Selected Poems
Written in a single year before Keats died at 25, this selection gathers five of the greatest poems in the English language: the odes to Autumn, a Nightingale, a Grecian Urn, Melancholy, and Psyche. Keats's concept of "negative capability" (the capacity to live with uncertainty and doubt without irritably reaching after fact and reason) remains the most useful poetic principle anyone has articulated. His sensory richness is still unmatched.
Outside the half-dozen great odes you are in apprentice country: Endymion's syrup, sonnets straining for effect, two Hyperions abandoned mid-climb. Keats died before he could prune himself, so every selection carries the lush early excess his contemporaries jeered at as Cockney. Be ready to forgive a great deal of bower, dew, and thee.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
