Cover of Keats

Keats

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.

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"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

Audience
adult
Length
epic · 656 pages

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Liked Keats? Here’s where I’d start.

These suit anyone who liked Keats. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.

  1. Byron: Life and Legend Shares biography, nonfiction, romanticism
  2. Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography Shares biography, poetry, nonfiction
  3. Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame Shares biography, poetry, nonfiction
  4. Being Shelley: The Poet's Search for Himself Shares biography, poetry, nonfiction

“People who read Keats tend to reach for these next.”

  1. E. M. Forster: A Life
  2. Coleridge: Early Visions, 1772-1804
  3. Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life
  4. John Keats: A New Life

“If you want more of the same (biography about writers), start with these.”

  1. Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804-1834
  2. The Life of Emily Dickinson
  3. Rimbaud: A Biography
  4. Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“If it was the poetry that hooked you, try one of these.”

  1. W. H. Auden: A Biography
  2. E. E. Cummings: A Poet's Life
  3. The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth
  4. The Man Who Went into the West: The Life of R.S. Thomas

“These start from a similar idea, even if they go somewhere else with it.”

  1. Selected Letters, 1940-1985
  2. My Life in My Words
  3. Selected Poems and Letters
  4. Selected Letters