Keats and Shelley

Keats and Shelley: Winds of Light combines unrivalled textual knowledge, biographical and contextual expertise, and profoundly insightful close readings of the poetry in a selection of outstanding essays from a leading critic of English Romantic Poetry. Some of the essays have been previously published and are established as classic studies, which have strongly influenced scholarly interpretation of the poems they discuss, including landmark readings of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, 'Julian and Maddalo' and 'Ozymandias', and Keats's 'Isabella: or the Pot of Basil' and his sonnet 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer'. These are brought into relationship with new work on the two poets, in a wide-ranging set of meditations which centre on Shelley's great elegy for Keats, Adonais. An introductory chapter considers the strongly contrasting poetic styles and achievement of the two iconic 'young Romantics', a contrast which has been obscured by their conventional close pairing in popular culture. Five studies of Keats are followed by a pivotal account of Shelley's elaborately-wrought poetic tribute to Keats's destined greatness, which leads in to a balancing six studies of Shelley. Both poets are situated illuminatingly in their literary, personal, and social-historical milieu, through a series of perspectives which combine lucid particularity with powerful generalization. The essays move from detailed analysis of textual minutiae to deep reflection on fundamental themes in the work of Keats and Shelley, including the ultimate themes of transience and permanence, and of life, death, and immortality.

Kelvin Everest taught English Literature at St David's University College Lampeter and Leicester University, and since 1991 he has been A.C. Bradley Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Liverpool, where he also served as Pro-Vice-Chancellor for 15 years. Professor Everest has held visiting positions at St John's College, Oxford, and Trinity College, Cambridge and he has published widely on the English Romantic poets, in books, edited collections, and journals. Since the early 1980s, he has been editing the Complete Poems of Shelley for the Longman Annotated English Poets series, published in five volumes.