The Eve of St Agnes (Penguin Little Black Classics)

by John Keats

Paperback, no date

Status

Available

Call number

PR4834 .E8

Genres

Fiction

Publication

Penguin Classic (2012), 64 pages

Description

'Hoodwink'd in faery fancy...'This volume contains a selection of Keats's greatest verse - including his gothic story in verse, 'The Eve of St Agnes', and the mysterious 'Lamia' - exploring themes of love, enchantment, myth and magic.Introducing Little Black Classics- 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions.… (more)

Media reviews

London Review of Books

Leigh Hunt shrewdly opined that ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ was the best poem Keats wrote, and modern criticism is just beginning uneasily to wonder if he may not have been right... And of course Keats turned against the poem, as he habitually did when he had done something marvelous... He could not

see how the incongruous factors in ‘St Agnes Eve’ nonetheless worked together to make it the kind of masterpiece adored by the Victorians. Porphyro, ‘brushing the cobwebs with his lofty plume’ in true ‘Mother Radcliffe’ style (yet who but Keats would have seen a helmet plume as brushing the cobwebs?), is a figure of complex human and poetic origins, a voyeur and would-be seducer who is also a rapt adoring lover longing to make Madeline his bride. Troilus, Iachimo and Romeo are present in him, but he is also very much his Keatsian self, like one of the ‘carvèd angels, ever eager-eyed’.

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User reviews

LibraryThing member aulsmith

A narrative poem about a girl who asks St. Agnes to give her a vision of her future husband and wakes to find her admirer Prothero, an enemy of her family, sitting by her bed ready to take her away.

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LibraryThing member SashaM

I liked the Eve of St Agnes but Lamia bored me brainless and the last left me indifferent. I felt this is another one that would benefit from some explainitary notes on historical / mythical references

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