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Keats : a brief life in nine poems and one epitaph / Lucasta Miller.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2022Copyright date: ©2021Edition: First American editionDescription: 353 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (chiefly color) ; 21 cmContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 9780525655831
  • 0525655832
Subject(s): Genre/Form:
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.
Summary: "A new biography of John Keats that uncovers the reality of his imagination within the context of his time"-- Provided by publisher.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, having taken a battering from the conservative press, few critics imagined he would be considered one of the great English poets two hundred years later, though he himself had an inkling. 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. Combining close-up readings of his writings with the story of his brief but teeming existence, Lucasta Miller shows us how Keats made his poetry, and explains why it retains its vertiginous originality and continues to speak to us across the generations." -- Amazon.com.
Holdings
Item type Home library Collection Call number Materials specified Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Adult Book Adult Book Main Library Biography KEATS, J. M648 Available 33111010821698
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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.

"This is a Borzoi Book published by Alfred A. Knopf."

Includes bibliographical references (pages 331-337) and index.

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.

"A new biography of John Keats that uncovers the reality of his imagination within the context of his time"-- Provided by publisher.

"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, having taken a battering from the conservative press, few critics imagined he would be considered one of the great English poets two hundred years later, though he himself had an inkling. 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. Combining close-up readings of his writings with the story of his brief but teeming existence, Lucasta Miller shows us how Keats made his poetry, and explains why it retains its vertiginous originality and continues to speak to us across the generations." -- Amazon.com.

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