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Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph
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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
"She persuasively shows, however, that the predominantly indigenous word choices produce as politically charged a celebration of Englishness as the famous passage in Emma ..."
"It's thrilling to follow Miller's demonstration of how the rapidly written 'Ode to a Nightingale' (possibly heightened by laudanum) evokes images, just as Schubert's music uses notes, to express the indefinable."
"It is a pleasure to have the full text of a poem at the beginning of each chapter, followed by a personal essay combining Keats's story with the author's sensible, attentive understanding of each poem, in itself and as part of the poet's life story ..."
"This candor adds to rather than detracts from the affectionate picture she paints of a young man who alternated between ambition and insecurity ..."
"These flaws, however, detract little from the value of Miller's book ..."
"The words just come to him, unimpeded'."
"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 ..."
"personal sections bring in some levity to balance her taut analysis."
"The temptation (never perhaps more irresistible than it is today) to judge art by moral criteria is always a dangerous one, but in this instance especially."
"[a] thoughtful, personal appreciation ..."
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