John Keats

Front Cover
Harvard University Press, 2009 M07 1 - 780 pages
The life of Keats provides a unique opportunity for the study of literary greatness and of what permits or encourages its development. Its interest is deeply human and moral, in the most capacious sense of the words. In this authoritative biography--the first full-length life of Keats in almost forty years--the man and the poet are portrayed with rare insight and sympathy. In spite of a scarcity of factual data for his early years, the materials for Keats's life are nevertheless unusually full. Since most of his early poetry has survived, his artistic development can be observed more closely than is possible with most writers; and there are times during the period of his greatest creativity when his personal as well as his artistic life can be followed week by week. The development of Keats's poetic craftsmanship proceeds simultaneously with the steady growth of qualities of mind and character. Mr. Bate has been concerned to show the organic relationship between the poet's art and his larger, more broadly humane development. Keats's great personal appeal--his spontaneity, vigor, playfulness, and affection--are movingly recreated; at the same time, his valiant attempt to solve the problem faced by all modern poets when they attempt to achieve originality and amplitude in the presence of their great artistic heritage is perceptively presented. In discussing this matter, Mr. Bate says, The pressure of this anxiety and the variety of reactions to it constitute one of the great unexplored factors in the history of the arts since 1750. And in no major poet, near the beginning of the modern era, is this problem met more directly than it is in Keats. The way in which Keats was somehow able, after the age of twenty-two, to confront this dilemma, and to transcend it, has fascinated every major poet who has used the English language since Keats's death and also every major critic since the Victorian era. Mr. Bate has availed himself of all new biographical materials, published and unpublished, and has used them selectively and without ostentation, concentrating on the things that were meaningful to Keats. Similarly, his discussions of the poetry are not buried beneath the controversies of previous critics. He approaches the poems freshly and directly, showing their relation to Keats's experience and emotions, to premises and values already explored in the biographical narrative. The result is a book of many dimensions, not a restricted critical or biographical study but a fully integrated whole.
 

Contents

The First Years
1
Abbeys Wards 18101815
23
in Guys Hospital
43
An Adventure in Hope Summer 1816
67
The Commitment to Poetry Chapmans Homer Hunt and Haydon Autumn 1816
84
Completing the First Volume November and December 1816
107
The Laurel Crown and the Vision of Greatness December 1816 to March 1817
131
A Trial of Invention Endymion
149
Hyperion and a New Level of Writing
388
Fanny Brawne The Eve of St Agnes Winter 181819
418
A Period of Uncertainty February to April 1819
452
The Odes of April and May 1819
486
The Final Beginning Lamia May to July 1819
525
The Close of the Fertile Year To Autumn and The Fall of Hyperion July to September 1819
562
Illness Autumn and Winter
606
Adrift January to August 1820
628

An Act of Will June to December 1817
193
Negative Capability
233
Another Beginning December and January 1817i8
264
Devonshire and Isabella February to April 1818
294
The Burden of the Mystery The Emergence of a Modern Poet Spring 1818
316
The Departure of George Keats and the Scottish Tour Summer 1818
339
Reviews the Writing of Hyperion the Death of Tom Keats Autumn 1818
363
The Voyage to Italy August to November 1820
654
November 1820 to February 1821
671
I Family Origins
701
II The Length of Keatss Apprenticeship
703
The Keats Childrens Inheritance
705
Inde2
713
Copyright

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About the author (2009)

The late Walter Jackson Bate authored several books, including two on Keats as well as Criticism: The Major Texts, From Classic to Romantic, and The Achievement of Samuel Johnson, winner of the Christian Gauss Award of Phi Beta Kappa in 1956. He was Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor of the Humanities at Harvard.

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