Home › Books › Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph
Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph
by
72/99
Critics' Rating Index
62/99
Readers' Rating Index
n/a
Scholars' Citation Index
96/99
Volume of Reviews
36/99
Volume of Reader Ratings
Sign in to add to your shelf, rate, or review this book.
About This Book
A dazzling new look into the short but intense, tragic life and remarkable work of John Keats, one of the greatest lyric poets of the English language, seen in a whole new light, not as the mythologized Victorian guileless nature-lover, but as the subversive, bawdy complex cynic whose life and poetry were lived and created on the edge. In this brief life, acclaimed biographer Lucasta Miller takes nine of Keats's best-known poems—"Endymion"; "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer"; "Ode to a Nightingale"; "To Autumn"; "Bright Star" among them—and excavates how they came to be and what in Keats's life led to their creation. She writes of aspects of Keats's life that have been overlooked, and explores his imagination in the context of his world and experience, paying tribute to the unique quality of his mind. Miller, through Keats's poetry, brilliantly resurrects and brings vividly to life, the man, the poet in all his complexity and spirit, living dangerously, disdaining respectability and cultural norms, and embracing subversive politics. Keats was a lower-middle-class outsider from a tragic and fractured family, whose extraordinary energy and love of language allowed him to pummel his way into the heart of English literature; a freethinker and a liberal at a time of repression, who delighted in the sensation of the moment. We see how Keats was regarded by his contemporaries (his writing was seen as smutty) and how the young poet's large and boisterous life—a man of the metropolis, who took drugs, was sexually reckless and afflicted with syphilis—went straight up against the Victorian moral grain; and Miller makes clear why his writing—considered marginal and avant-garde in his own day—retains its astonishing originality, sensuousness and power two centuries on.
Reviews
"for many people he is their favourite poet, and they are likely to resent a third party barging in between them and a much loved poem."
"To encourage us to have another look, Miller has had the excellent idea of talking us through nine of Keats's most famous poems and carefully unpicking some of the ideas and images in them, while giving the story of his life a shake-up at the same time ..."
"This penetrating and charming study will enchant Keats's fans."
"Miller's Keats is Keats, but not, thankfully, as we know him."
"One of the main achievements of Lucasta Miller's enlightening guide to the poems and their creator is to banish the sentimental image to which Shelley's 'Adonais'—published just a few months after Keats's death by a poet who scarcely knew him—contributed much with its self-serving lament for an ethereal spirit destroyed by a hostile press ..."
"[Miller's] impoverished view of literature risks reducing it to just another branch of the social sciences and is prevalent in academia at the moment."
"Lucasta Miller's task, which she carries out very successfully, is to strip away what we think when we think about Keats."
"Miller's sharp eye for the neologisms for which Keats was reprimanded by reviewers...provides yet another point of contact between Keats and his contemporary, John Clare."
"Miller's up to the challenge ..."
"Fans of Helen Vendler's Coming of Age as a Poet will appreciate this acute study of Keats's democratic verse."
Preview
Reader Reviews
0 reviewsSign in to write a review.
No reader reviews yet. Be the first!