Description

Knopf, hardcover

Publication Date:April 26, 2022

Publisher Marketing:A dazzling new look into the short but intense, tragic life and remarkable work of 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 Keatss best-known poemsEndymion; On First Looking into Chapmans Homer; Ode to a Nightingale; To Autumn; Bright Staramong themand excavates how they came to be and what in Keatss life led to their creation. She writes of aspects of Keatss 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 Keatss 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 poets large and boisterous lifea man of the metropolis, who took drugs, was sexually reckless and afflicted with syphiliswent straight up against the Victorian moral grain; and Miller makes clear why his writingconsidered marginal and avant-garde in his own dayretains its astonishing originality, sensuousness and power two centuries on.