Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph

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.