Keats by Lucasta Miller

Keats by Lucasta Miller

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.

LUCASTA MILLER is a British literary critic who has worked for The Independent and The Guardian, and contributed to The Economist, The Times (London), The New Statesman, and the BBC. She was the founding editorial director of Notting Hill Editions and has been a visiting scholar at Wolfson College, Oxford, and a visiting fellow at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. She lives in London with her husband, the tenor Ian Bostridge, and their two children.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780525655831
ISBN 10	0525655832
Title	Keats
Author	Lucasta Miller
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Alfred A. Knopf
Year published	2022-04-19
Number of pages	368
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.