Keats: a brief life in nine poems and one epitaph
Published by Jonathan Cape on 4 February 2021.
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.
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Reviews
Picked as a standout title for 2021 by The Sunday Times, The Times, The Financial Times, The Evening Standard, The Daily Mail and The Guardian
‘Outstanding … Her knowledge of all things Keatsian is formidable … Miller’s is the best short introduction I have come across’ - John Carey, The Sunday Times
‘As a wittily perceptive introduction to (or reminder of) the poet and his works, her book is unlikely to be surpassed any time soon’ - Financial Times
‘Lucasta Miller’s brilliant life of Keats, told through a close reading of “nine poems and one epitaph”, reminds us … of the way in which Keats can … stop us in our readerly tracks … a timely and fresh re-appropriation … satisfying, engaging and accessible’ – New Statesman
‘A readable guide to the poet’s life … Miller is astute’ - The Times
‘This excellent book marks the 200th anniversary of the poet’s death. It enters an already crowded market of Keats biographies, but earns its place through its firm basis in precise reading. Miller is empathetic, and relishes Keats’s best phrases … If you read the words, Miller persuades us, whether of the poems or the great letters, Keats is there, as new as ever’ - Spectator
‘excellent … Keats would have approved’ - Evening Standard