Poesía completa

John Keats is one of the first and most assiduous cultivators of metapoetry in his century. In this sense, and in others, he already heralds Rimbaud and Rilke. Like the Frenchman, he is a visionary poet. Like the German-language poet, he turns what he touches into an art object, into a thing-poem. Joyful Midas of powerful imagination, little Keats tiptoed through life perhaps, but with a firm step he entered poetry, into the blank kingdom of word and spirit. Like the title of one of his lesser-known poems, he succeeded in making himself the builder of the verbal castle, the Borgesian Maker of the poem. Because of his warm voice, he could be defined as an Italian poet born in England. The truth is that in the end he was undoubtedly an English poet who died in Italy, in Rome, in 1821, while climbing, according to legend, the steps of the Plaza de España. This version of the complete poetry of Keats, in a bilingual edition, follows the canonical edition of The Complete Poems of John Keats, as edited by Paul Wright (Wordsworth Poetry Library, London, 2001). The best-known Keats in Spain has always been the one with sonnets and odes, but in this edition of his complete work the reader will find other Keats that are equally lofty and surprising, such as the author of El sombrero de cascabeles, an extraordinary poem that is epic and nonsense at the same time. Like all great poets, Keats has a humorous streak that, in his case, precedes the irony of later authors (a Laforgue or an Eliot, the latter a poet so far from romanticism). And above all, there is the magician Keats of language and imagination, the two essential elements in every good poet. José Luis Rey, another essential poet, one of the most notable that our poetry has produced in recent years, translates an essential work into Spanish.