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'White's groundbreaking book combines two exceptional dimensions of Keats's career into one compelling argument: the genius of the 1820 collection and the significance of Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy for Keats's poetry. White goes where no-one has gone before: he unravels and decodes the marvelous pyrotechnics of Burton's proto-psychological medical text into a deepened, enhanced understanding of Keats's final collection.'
Heidi Thomson, Victoria University of Wellington

John Keats's classic volume of poetry, considered in the light of the history of melancholy

This book examines John Keats's immensely important collection of poems, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, And Other Poems (1820), and is published in the volume's bicentenary. It analyses the collection as an authorially organised and multi-dimensionally unified volume rather than as a collection of occasional poems. R. S. White argues that a guiding theme behind the 1820 volume is the persistent emphasis on different types of melancholy, an ancient, all-consuming medical condition and literary preoccupation in Renaissance and Romantic poetry. Melancholy was a lifelong interest of Keats's, touching on his medical training, his temperament and his delighted reading in 1819 of Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy.

R. S. White is Emeritus Winthrop Professor of English at The University of Western Australia.

Isabella and the Pot of Basil, 1907 (oil on canvas), Waterhouse, John William (1849-1917) / Private Collection / Photo © Christie's Images / Bridgeman Images

978-1-4744-8045-1