Bibliograph

Keats, a brief life in nine poems and one epitaph, Lucasta Miller

Type

Label

Keats, a brief life in nine poems and one epitaph, Lucasta Miller

Language

eng

Bibliography note

Includes bibliographical references (pages 331-337) and index

resource.biographical

contains biographical information

Illustrations

illustrationsplates

Index

index present

Literary Form

non fiction

Main title

Keats

Nature of contents

bibliography

Responsibility statement

Lucasta Miller

Sub title

a brief life in nine poems and one epitaph

Summary

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 twenty-five, few critics imagined he would be considered one of the great English poets two hundred years later. In this brief life, Lucasta Miller takes Keats's best-known poems, the ones you are most likely to have read, and excavates their backstories. In doing so, she resurrects the real Keats: a lower-middle-class outsider from a tragic and dysfunctional 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; a human being who delighted in the sensation of the moment; but a complex individual, not the ethereal figure of his posthumous myth

Table Of Contents

Prologue: Body and soul -- On first looking into Chapman's Homer -- "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever" (from Endymion) -- Isabella; or, the pot of basil -- The eve of St. Agnes -- La belle dame sans merci : a ballad -- Ode to a nightingale -- Ode on a Grecian urn -- To autumn -- Bright star! -- Epitaph: Here lies one whose name was writ in water

Classification