Page:The complete poetical works and letters of John Keats, 1899.djvu/16

vi rather historical and bibliographical. In the preparation of these notes, as also of the Notes and Illustrations in the Appendix, I must again acknowledge my great indebtedness to Mr. Forman.

In undertaking to assemble Keats's Complete Poetical Works, I have been aware that I was including some things which neither Keats nor any one else would call poetical. Yet besides the contribution which verse makes to beauty, there is also the light which it throws on the poetical mind and character. And since the volume of Keats's production is not large, and much of his posthumous poetry is rightly classed with his own acknowledged work, it seemed best to give everything, but to make the natural discrimination between the poetry in the body of the volume and that which follows in the division, Supplementary Verse. The personality of Keats is so vivid, that just as his friends in his lifetime and after his death carefully garnered every scrap which he wrote, so the friends created by his life and his poetry may be trusted to know what his imperishable verse is, and yet will handle affectionately even the toys he played with.

Although I have endeavored to draw from Keats's letters such passages as throw direct light on his poetry, there yet remains an undefined scholia in the whole body of his familiar correspondence. No attentive reader of Keats's letters will fail to find in these unstudied, spontaneous expressions of the poet's mind a lambent light playing all over the surface of his poetry, and therefore it is not a wide departure from the scheme of this series of poets to include, in the same volume with Keats's poems, a collection also of his letters. This collection is complete, though one or two brief notes will not be found here, because already printed in the headings to poems. I have been dependent for the text mainly upon Mr. Colvin, supplemented by the minute garnering of Mr. Forman. I have to thank Mr. John Gilmer Speed for his courtesy in permitting the use of letters which he derived from the papers of his grandfather, George Keats. , August, 1899.