Written in a single year before Keats died at 25, this selection gathers five of the greatest poems in the English language: the odes to Autumn, a Nightingale, a Grecian Urn, Melancholy, and Psyche. Keats's concept of "negative capability" (the capacity to live with uncertainty and doubt without irritably reaching after fact and reason) remains the most useful poetic principle anyone has articulated. His sensory richness is still unmatched.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.