This Norton Critical Edition seeks to return Keats—one of the most beloved poets of the English language—to his cultural moment by tracking his emergence as a public poet. For this reason, this volume presents the writings in the order of publication rather than composition. Readers can trace the poems through letters, reviews, and related material chronologically interleaved with the texts themselves. This edition offers extensive apparatus to help readers fully appreciate Keats’s poetry and legacy, including an introduction, headnotes, explanatory annotations, and a wealth of contextual documents.

"Criticism" includes twelve important commentaries on Keats and his poetry, by Paul de Man, Marjorie Levinson, Grant F. Scott, Margaret Homans, Nicholas Roe, Stuart Sperry, Neil Fraistat, Jack Stillinger, James Chandler, Alan Bewell, and Jeffrey N. Cox.