Keats - Softcover

Motion, Andrew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226542408 ISBN 13: 9780226542409

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1999

Synopsis

Andrew Motion's dramatic narration of Keats's life is the first in a generation to take a fresh look at this great English Romantic poet. Unlike previous biographers, Motion pays close attention to the social and political worlds Keats inhabited. Making incisive use of the poet's inimitable letters, Motion presents a masterful account.

"Motion has given us a new Keats, one who is skinned alive, a genius who wrote in a single month all the poems we cherish, a victim who was tormented by the best doctors of the age. . . . This portrait, stripped of its layers of varnish and restored to glowing colours, should last us for another generation."—Edmund White, The Observer Review

"Keats's letters fairly leap off the page. . . . [Motion] listens for the 'freely associating inquiry and incomparable verve and dash,' the 'headlong charge,' of Keats's jazzlike improvisations, which give us, like no other writing in English, the actual rush of a man thinking, a mind hurtling forward unpredictably and sweeping us along."—Morris Dickstein, New York Times Book Review

"Scrupulous and eloquent."—Gregory Feeley, Philadelphia Inquirer

About this title

Review:

Whitbread Prize-winning biographer Andrew Motion (Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life) aims to broaden our understanding of John Keats (1795-1821) by paying close attention to the historical context in which he wrote and the political opinions he voiced. The poet was "of a sceptical and republican school," Motion argues, and Keats's work reflected his experiences "not just as a private individual, but socially and politically as well." This bracing reinterpretation stresses the vigor of Keats's character as well as his verse, burying for good the sentimental cliché of a sickly dreamer concerned only with art for art's sake.

About the Author:

Andrew Motion was Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009; he is Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway College, University of London, and co-founder of the online Poetry Archive. He has received numerous awards for his poetry, and has published four celebrated biographies. His group study The Lamberts won the Somerset Maugham Award and Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life - his authorised life of Philip Larkin - won the Whitbread Prize for Biography. His memoir, In the Blood (2006), was described as 'the most moving and exquisitely written account of childhood loss I have ever read' in the Independent on Sunday. Andrew Motion was knighted for his services to poetry in 2009.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0226542408
• ISBN 13: 9780226542409
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 656