All of Keats's poetry is available in one volume entitled The Complete Poems. This book is edited by John Barnard and was published in 1977 by Penguin. The Modern Library also has a volume entitled The Complete Poems of John Keats, published in 1994, but it uses a revised version of "La Belle Dame sans Merci" that almost no other publisher uses.
Sir Walter Scott's novel Ivanhoe was published the same year as "La Belle Dame sans Merci." It is a tale of knights and sorcery set in the Middle Ages and began a trend in historical fiction that has come to characterize the romantic movement.
Since Keats presents his knight as turning pale and drawn, literally dying of lovesickness, students might want to read Susan Sontag's groundbreaking 1978 essay "Illness as Metaphor." It was republished.....
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