Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph by Lucasta Miller

[Helen Sellings]

Lucasta Miller takes Keats’s best known poems and fully examines their backstories.  In doing so, she provides great insight into his tragic life and dysfunctional family and how he managed to make his way to the heart of English literature.  Combining a close look at his work, his letters, and relationships shows how Keats made his poetry, and explains why it retains its vertiginous originality and continues to enthrall across the generations.  Keats composed his own epitaph ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water’; few critics of the day imagined he would be considered one of the great English poets two hundred years later.  This book is a must read for all poetry lovers.

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