"The Eve of St. Agnes" was written in January 1819 and first published in 1820. It is a Romantic Narrative poem written in 42 Spenserian stanzas. John Keats based his poem on the superstition that a girl could see her future husband in a dream if she performed certain rites on the eve of the feast of St. Agnes (the patron saint of virgins who died a martyr in 4th century Rome.) The eve falls on January 20th; the feast day on the 21st. 

Award-winning narrator Mike Vendetti reads "Ode to a Nightingale", a personal poem that describes Keats's journey into a state of negative capability. The tone of the poem rejects the optimistic pursuit of pleasure found within Keats's earlier poems and, instead, explores the themes of nature, transience, and mortality, the latter being particularly relevant to Keats. 

Endymion is the largest work by John Keats and was composed between April and November 1817. It was published in April 1818, and the critical reception was almost universally hostile. The plot is built around the ancient Greek legend of Endymion, the young shepherd whose beauty was such that the goddess of the Moon entreated Zeus to cast him into a permanent sleep so that she could gaze on him without interruption. Keats expands this story into an epistle on beauty and love, and weaves into it elements from several other Greek legends.

The epitaph John Keats composed for his own gravestone - 'Here lies one whose name was writ in water' - seemingly damned him to oblivion. When he died at the age of 25, having taken a battering from the conservative press, few critics imagined he would be considered one of the great English poets 200 years later, though he himself had an inkling. In this brief life, Lucasta Miller takes Keats' best-known poems - the ones you are most likely to have read - and excavates their backstories.

Arthur Miller’s most famous play, Death of a Salesman, has become a key text in Western literature. This unusually powerful recording, made for radio in 1953, was directed by Elia Kazan who premiered the play. It features Thomas Mitchell and Arthur Kennedy as father and son. Willy, a travelling salesman, based in New York, relentlessly chases material success.

If you don't know Melville's letters to Hawthorne, you don't know Melville. These letters are full of passion, humor, doubt, and spiritual yearning, and offer an intimate view of Melville's personality. Lyrical and effusive, they are literary works in themselves. This correspondence has been out of print for decades, and even when it was in print it appeared in scholarly volumes of Melville's complete correspondence, aimed at the academy.

Sartor Resartus is one of the most unusual, even quirky, British novels to emerge from the first half of the 19th century. Published in 1836, its varied heritage reflects the earlier eccentricities of Sterne and Swift, mixed with influences from Goethe. Its subject matter is strange: it concerns a book called Clothes: Their Origin and Influence by one Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, a German philosopher. Though Thomas Carlyle became a household name in his lifetime, his comic novel Sartor Resartus would prove to have a lasting effect on contemporary writers.

A Confession, or My Confession, is a short work on the subject of melancholia, philosophy and religion by the acclaimed Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. It was written in 1879 to 1880, when Tolstoy was in his early fifties.

Shakespeare's Othello is one of his finest and most famous tragedies. This highly acclaimed performance, which ran between November 2007 and February 2008 at the Donmar Warehouse in London, features Chiwetel Ejiofor as the Moor Othello, Ewan McGregor as the scheming Iago, and Kelly Reilly as the gentle Desdemona. This recording features music written specifically for the stage production which enjoyed huge success - each performance was a sell-out.

Considered the first full-length detective novel in the English language, T.S. Eliot described The Moonstone as 'the first and greatest English detective novel'. The stone of the title is an enormous yellow diamond plundered from an Indian shrine after the Siege of Seringapatam. Given to Miss Verinder on her 18th birthday, it mysteriously disappears that very night. Suspicion falls on three Indian jugglers who have been seen in the neighbourhood. Sergeant Cuff is assigned to the case....

Collected Essays contains nearly 80 essays, reviews and occasional pieces composed between novels, plays and travel books over four prolific decades. From Henry James and Somerset Maugham to Ho Chi Minh and Kim Philby, the range of subjects is eclectic and stimulating, his subjects brought vividly to life. The resulting collection is as revealing as autobiography and characteristically rich in humour, insight and doubt.

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage is a fascinating portrait of 19th-century Europe - disillusioned and ravaged by the wars of the postrevolutionary and Napoleonic eras. Our protagonist, whose breathtaking journey eerily echoes Byron's own life story, forgoes his destiny back home for the exciting unknown - the nature of humanity and the transformative effects of travel burst through the pages in four powerful cantos of Spenserian stanzas. Here is the poem that set Byron on his meteoric rise to fame in London society.

Edgar Allan Poe was a writer, poet, editor and literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre, and is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in the United States and of American literature. Poe was one of the country's earliest practitioners of the short story and considered to be the inventor of the detective fiction genre, as well as a significant contributor to the emerging genre of science fiction. 

In arguably his most personal and lasting work, America's most daringly original and controversial critic gives us brief, luminous readings of more than 80 texts by canonical authors - texts he has had by heart since childhood. 

John Keats died 200 years ago, in February 1821. F. Scott Fitzgerald defined a decade that began 100 years ago, the Jazz Age. In this biography, prizewinning author Jonathan Bate recreates these two shining, tragic lives in parallel. Not only was Fitzgerald profoundly influenced by Keats, titling Tender Is the Night and other works from the poet’s lines, but the two lived with echoing fates: both died young, loved to drink, were plagued by tuberculosis, were haunted by their first love and wrote into a new decade of release, experimentation and decadence.