Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph

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.

Author: Lucasta Miller
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
Published: 04/19/2022
Pages: 368
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.13lbs
Size: 8.31h x 5.43w x 1.37d
ISBN: 9780525655831


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 10/01/2021 pg. 23
Kirkus Reviews 12/01/2021
Publishers Weekly 12/06/2021
Library Journal 04/01/2022 pg. 86

About the Author
LUCASTA MILLER is a British literary critic who has worked for The Independent and The Guardian, and contributed to The Times (London), The New Statesman, and the BBC. She lives in London with her husband, the tenor Ian Bostridge, and their two children.