The Texts of Keats's Poems

Jack Stillinger's concern is with the words of Keats's texts: “I wish,” he says, “to get rid of the wrong ones and to suggest how to go about constructing texts with a greater proportion of the right ones.” He finds that in the two best modern editions of Keats, one third of the texts have one or more wrong words. Modern editors have sometimes based their texts on inferior holograph, transcript, or printed versions; sometimes combined readings from separate versions; sometimes retained word...