1 post tagged “keats”
Keats, John. The Complete Poems. Ed. John Barnard. 3rd ed. London: Penguin, 1988 (1814-1820).
Keats, John. The Letters of John Keats. Ed. Maurice Buxton Forman. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1931 (1815-1820).
Bate, W. Jackson. John Keats. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963.
You can't do this kind of concurrent reading with every writer (the thought of trying it with Henry James gives me the shivers), but Keats's career is so brief and changes so rapidly that periodic switching from work to life and back again makes a pretty congenial project. What cheered me in the overall sad story was Keats's silliness as a person (at dinner he starts an impromptu concert with his friends; he makes the bassoon noises), his nerdy bookishness (Shakespeare and Milton are never out of his mind for a moment), and the way his ambition keeps pace about a league ahead of whatever he's actually working on. The unfathomably brilliant works -- the sonnets, odes, ballads -- appear almost by accident, while his greatest effort is turned to those longer pieces in which compositional brilliance is tied to structural flaws that he's always aware of, keeps trying to outpace, keeps discovering in new forms. It's the admission of uncertainty, the continued questing, that makes me feel so warm - maybe in this era of improved medical care there is still hope for us all.
Keats, John. The Letters of John Keats. Ed. Maurice Buxton Forman. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1931 (1815-1820).
Bate, W. Jackson. John Keats. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963.
You can't do this kind of concurrent reading with every writer (the thought of trying it with Henry James gives me the shivers), but Keats's career is so brief and changes so rapidly that periodic switching from work to life and back again makes a pretty congenial project. What cheered me in the overall sad story was Keats's silliness as a person (at dinner he starts an impromptu concert with his friends; he makes the bassoon noises), his nerdy bookishness (Shakespeare and Milton are never out of his mind for a moment), and the way his ambition keeps pace about a league ahead of whatever he's actually working on. The unfathomably brilliant works -- the sonnets, odes, ballads -- appear almost by accident, while his greatest effort is turned to those longer pieces in which compositional brilliance is tied to structural flaws that he's always aware of, keeps trying to outpace, keeps discovering in new forms. It's the admission of uncertainty, the continued questing, that makes me feel so warm - maybe in this era of improved medical care there is still hope for us all.
