Excerpt from The Poems of John Keats A word must be said in explanation, and if need be in defence, of the arrangement of the Posthumous and Fugitive Poems. It is a practice widely followed by modern scholarship to collect under this head every scrap of verse that can be dis covered, and to produce the whole under the title of Poems, and there is much to be said for the arrangement. On the other hand, I cannot help agreeing with Mr. Colvin that to print snatches of doggerel and nonsense-verses, such as are to be found in the Letters of Keats, gravely, among the poetical works, is to punish the levities of genius too hard, and I am convinced that when the Ode to Maia shares a page with Dawlish Fair, and La Belle Dame sans Merci is immediately preceded by Two or Three Posies, as the dates of composition demand, the mind is not attuned to their proper appreciation, and chrono logical accuracy is bought at a heavy price. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.