検索キーワード： "John Keats" 歴史

"Lamia" is the English Romantic poet John Keats's lush, eerie tale of enchantment defeated by merciless rationality. Set in the world of ancient Greco-Roman myth, the poem tells the story of the serpent-spirit Lamia, who talks the god Hermes into transforming her into a beautiful woman so she can pursue her beloved, a handsome young man named Lycius. The couple is blissfully happy for a time—but their joy can't last. Icy reason, in the form of the philosopher Apollonius, at last punctures their shared dream.

Lamia is a tragic narrative poem in two parts. It was written in 1819 and first published in 1820 with "Isabella" and "The Eve of St. Agnes". The Greek god Hermes has left Olympus in search of a beautiful nymph. He comes across Lamia, a woman trapped in the form of a snake, who promises to reveal the nymph to him if he, in exchange, restores her human form so she may seek the love of Lycius, a youth of Corinth.

The Eve of St. Agnes was first published in 1820 in a collection containing many of Keat's best-known poems. Several of these were retellings of stories that were popular in the Middle Ages and earlier times.

This anthology looks back over some of the great love affairs of literary history. It includes readings of poetry, letters and scenes from fiction written by British poets and authors from Shakespearian times to the twentieth century. Here are real-life romantic couples, such as Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats and Fanny Brawne, Lord Byron and Lady Caroline Lamb, Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning.