Keats published three volumes of poetry before his death at age twenty-five of tuberculosis and, while many of his contemporaries were prompt to recognize his greatness, snobbery and political hostility led the Tory press to vilify and patronize him as a "Cockney poet." Financial anxieties and the loss of those he loved most had tried him persistently, yet he dismissed the concept of life as a vale of tears and substituted the concept of a "vale of Soul-making." His poetry and his remarkable letters reveal a spirit of questing vitality and profound understanding and his final volume, which contains the great odes and the unfinished Hyperion, attests to an astonishing maturity of power.

    Never have two great writers set down their ideas so candidly and over so long a period of time on the most varied topics, including the genesis of their own writings. The elements of this correspondence been available for over a century, but never in a form accessible the general reader. For this edition, Alphonse Jacob has re-created the atmosphere in which the letters were written and has revived this masterpiece by two of France's greatest novelists: their intimate correspondence.

    Together, the Norton Critical Editions of Wordsworth's Poetry and Prose and The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850 are the essential texts for studying this author.Wordsworth's Poetry and Prose includes a large selection of texts chronologically arranged, thereby allowing readers to trace the author's evolving interests and ideas. An insightful general introduction and textual introduction precede the texts, each of which is fully annotated. Illustrative materials include maps, manuscript pages, and title pages. "Criticism" collects thirty responses to Wordsworth's poetry and prose spanning three centuries by British and American authors. Contributors include Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Felicia Hemans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lucy Newlyn, Stephen Gill, Neil Fraistat, Mary Jacobus, Nicholas Roe, M. H. Abrams, Karen Swann, Michael O'Neill, and Geoffrey Hartman, among others. The volume also includes a Chronology, a Biographical Register, a Selected Bibliography, and an Index of Titles and First Lines of Poems.

    Rogers Gore recounts stories told to him in person by Benjamin Austin Gollaher, boyhood friend of Abraham Lincoln while living in Kentucky. Most of these stories cannot be found anywhere else.