KEATS

Excavating the backstories behind a handful of the iconic romantic poet’s works.

British literary critic Miller turns to the life and works of John Keats (1795-1821), who, she admiringly writes, is “never a fixed entity. He’s always in motion.” Her goal in this thoughtful, personal appreciation is to get “under the skin” of nine of his greatest poems as “entry points” into a “young man caught in the fragile and jittery amber of the Romantic era.” Miller draws extensively on Keats’ “sinewy, free-flowing” letters, “among the best ever written in English.” His second published poem, “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer,” about reading, gained the novice 21-year-old poet some critical attention. “Chapman’s Homer,” writes Miller, reworked “the metaphor of the sonnet itself, on to another planet.” A year later, after giving up medical studies, Keats composed “Endymion” when his brother was suffering from tuberculosis. Harshly received, it was a “failed experiment, but it has indeed outlived him.” Miller also shows how “The Eve of St. Agnes,” a “verbal feast, its images appealing to all the senses,” is Keats’ “most explicitly erotic poem.” “On a sheer technical level there is much to unpack” in “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” and Miller’s up to the challenge. Keats created his own original stanza form, she notes, for “Ode to a Nightingale,” written in “one fell swoop,” in which he “incorporates the idea of melting into the very grammar of his lines.” One of his most famous poems, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” includes a line that has been discussed in classrooms countless times: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” Miller suggests that “To Autumn” is “probably today’s most widely read Romantic-era nature poem,” and she amply demonstrates why the poet’s “voice, marginal and avant-garde in his own day, retains its vertiginous originality.”

Subtly intertwining biographical detail with crisp readings of the poetry, Miller creates an insightful, vibrant portrait.