A Poet’s Poet: The Astonishing Career of John Keats

It’s a pleasure to have the total textual content of a poem originally of every chapter, adopted by a private essay combining Keats’s story with the writer’s smart, attentive understanding of every poem, in itself and as a part of the poet’s life story. The construction, with Miller’s occasional reminiscences of rising up close to Keats’s Hampstead and different North London neighborhoods, builds towards the good odes and the concluding, subtly ambiguous epitaph: “Right here lies One Whose Identify was writ in Water.”

“Writ in Water” is ambiguous as a result of destiny can’t be recognized. Even the archaic “writ” suggests endurance in time. Keats needed to at the very least suspect, or fantasize, that his title would possibly after his loss of life be written in print hundreds of thousands of occasions, because it has been, and spoken reverently many hundreds of thousands of occasions extra. Alternatively, he knew that he and his work would seemingly be quickly forgotten — he was not insane. However since his teenagers he had thought, spoken and written about becoming a member of the immortal poets. He knew that simply probably, for us sooner or later, there could be super that means within the phrases “John Keats.” Unknown or the other: The epitaph with its “writ in Water” works both approach as a magnificently shrewd piece of writing. The 9 phrases work effectively in anticipation of each reverse, potential realities.

That mastery of opposites and contradictions is mirrored at one other degree in “Ode to a Nightingale,” with “a drowsy numbness pains/My sense,” and the “nonetheless unravished bride” of “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” The doubleness of thoughts, or oppositional streak, additionally is sensible in a poet who preferred fistfights. At college he was “extra pugilistic than mental,” Miller writes.

In one among her greatest first-person passages, Miller — the writer of “The Brontë Fantasy” and “L.E.L.” — remembers from her faculty days two English lecturers who each taught Keats. There was an older, paternal, “considerably authoritarian” nature lover who took the category exterior, the place they sat on the grass, beneath the bushes, to listen to him learn “To Autumn” aloud. In distinction, the youthful, unstable instructor stated aloud to the identical college students, in a mocking, sarcastic deadpan, out of context, the a lot debated, ridiculed and defended Keatsian phrases “Magnificence is fact, fact magnificence.”

Keats as soon as wrote in a letter: “I’ve no belief no matter on Poetry. … The marvel is to me how folks learn a lot of it.”

Keats in fact would have the empathic detrimental functionality to embrace and see previous each the didactic nature lover and the ironic, debunking rationalist. A fighter with a genius for friendship, a joker and a lover of wine, he wrote in a letter Miller cites: “I’ve no belief no matter on Poetry. … The marvel is to me how folks learn a lot of it.” The “marvel” and the implied tormented laughter will probably be acknowledged not solely by poets however by anybody who has had a lover’s quarrel with their calling.

His calling demanded exhausting work. Miller provides readers the spectacular listing of poems Keats wrote within the 12 months 1819 — dozens of them, throughout a variety of genres and topics. On the coronary heart of all of it is his exceptional, distinctive ear for the melodies of sentence-shape and the expressive harmonic construction of consonants. A neighbor remembers of the pre-school-age Keats that “when he might simply converse, as an alternative of answering questions put to him, he would at all times make a rhyme to the final phrase folks stated, after which snicker.”

That flip of thoughts underlies the symphonic blather of “Endymion,” which advanced into the precision and richness of “Ode to a Nightingale” and “To Autumn.” The painter Benjamin Robert Haydon’s account of Keats reciting his “Hymn to Pan,” at Haydon’s request, to William Wordsworth, resembles the kid’s pleasure within the sound of rhyme: “I requested Keats to repeat it — which he did within the regular half-chant, (most touching) strolling up and down the room.” The “regular half-chant” is a hanging element, in its far more fascinating, actually extra tantalizing, than Wordsworth’s variously reported response of approval or condescension.