By structuring Keats around nine specific poems (and an epitaph), and allowing herself a recurring, candid first person, Miller evokes the shifting, various genius of her subject without dumbing-down, while avoiding the conventions of academic biography ... It is a pleasure to have the full text of a poem at the beginning of each chapter, followed by a personal essay combining Keats’s story with the author’s sensible, attentive understanding of each poem, in itself and as part of the poet’s life story ... Her commentary cannot replace, but does counterbalance, learned, impassioned debates about the ideas in Keats’s great letters. In this passage, she helps a reader perceive the actual, living, 25-year-old man ... Lucasta Miller’s brief, conversational (at moments chatty) book, with its organization based on the poet’s writing, making the poems the starting point, might be a fitting document, among many thousands, for that imaginary communication between John Keats and us, his future readers.
Lucasta Miller’s task, which she carries out very successfully, is to strip away what we think when we think about Keats. She presents him to us as he would have struck his first readers ... Close reading teases out much of the oddity, and goes on to root it in the circumstances of Keats’s life ... This excellent book marks the 200th anniversary of the poet’s death. It enters an already crowded market of Keats biographies, but earns its place through its firm basis in precise reading. Miller is empathetic, and relishes Keats’s best phrases ... She is patient with the (to me) increasingly ludicrous critical readings of ‘To Autumn’ as really about the Peterloo massacres. She persuasively shows, however, that the predominantly indigenous word choices produce as politically charged a celebration of Englishness as the famous passage in Emma ... If you read the words, Miller persuades us, whether of the poems or the great letters, Keats is there, as new as ever.
... an often irreverent yet compassionate approach to the poet that cuts through the hagiography. Ms. Miller’s Keats is not just a complex living person, but a damaged and at times positively perverse one ... As a poet her Keats is playful, even freakish, and often inappropriate. She is alert to a slippery eroticism in his best-known poems ... Her unpacking of his language, which is so brilliantly suited to representing material bodily experience, is often refreshingly matter of fact ... Keats the man also emerges as fully embodied ... Profligate, sexy, fond of a glass or two, and a little bit entitled, Ms. Miller’s Keats is Keats, but not, thankfully, as we know him.
The profile that historian and literary critic Lucasta Miller assembles in her engrossing Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph is a welcome corrective that seeks a truer understanding of the life and work of the iconic British poet ... Miller is an avowed Keatsian, but one of the strengths of this study is her refreshing willingness to call out the poet for some inferior writing just as often as she extols the brilliance of his more enduring masterworks ... This candor adds to rather than detracts from the affectionate picture she paints of a young man who alternated between ambition and insecurity ... Miller sharply centers his life in the context of its time, detailing the moral ambiguities and excesses of the Regency period that would later be whitewashed by the Victorians. While the U.S. publication of this superb volume misses the 200th anniversary of Keats’ death by a year, it is never a bad time to revisit a poetic genius. Miller has given us a thing of beauty, indeed.
Miller brings a fresh eye to the Keats story and to the poems, though it is one that feels somewhat politically correct
at times ... Strewn with opinions that seem adopted to bring Keats down a notch or two from the level of sanctification argued by earlier
critics ... But the allegation that Keats’s family fortune, modest though it was, just might have been tainted with the profits of slavery, an unproven theory, seems culturally rote; and at a different level entirely, to complain that Keats’s epistolary style is 'carelessly punctuated' is just schoolmarmish. Miller accuses Keats of a sort of social climbing in his admiration for Shelley over Burns, which is simply wrong-headed ... These criticisms are not meant to denigrate Miller’s book which, on the whole, is stylish, deeply well-informed, and accessibly written. She tells us at the outset that her book is 'by a reader for readers.' In other words, it does not fall into the usual genre of academic literary criticism, and it certainly benefits by that avoidance ... Some of Miller’s speculations are a bit questionable, if not far-fetched, but I admire the way that she often poses some theory...before admitting what is true.
... for many people he is their favourite poet, and they are likely to resent a third party barging in between them and a much loved poem. Miller, though, should win them over. Her knowledge of all things Keatsian is formidable, and she has lived all her life on what she calls 'the less fashionable side of Hampstead Heath', which was Keats’s stomping ground ... Reminiscences like this give her book an approachable, unstuffy feel and, evidently with younger readers in mind, she untangles the richly sensuous language of Keats’s poems ... Keats’s admirers may jib at some of Miller’s interpretations, especially her reading of 'The Eve of St Agnes' ... At times Miller’s interpretations depend on what seem questionable double entendres .. These flaws, however, detract little from the value of Miller’s book ... For newcomers to Keats, Miller’s is the best short introduction I have come across.
If there is little to surprise here, the reader is rewarded with Miller’s attention to Keats’s language, his formal choices and poetic experiments ... Miller’s sharp eye for the neologisms for which Keats was reprimanded by reviewers...provides yet another point of contact between Keats and his contemporary, John Clare. Elsewhere, the writer’s own language is less attentive. The conclusion of Miller’s chapter on 'Ode to a Nightingale' settles the poem in this way: 'Whether drug-induced or not, the text certainly shows him writing in a state of self-aware creative autopilot, devoid of the over-thinking which is so apparent in Endymion. The words just come to him, unimpeded'. Such a conclusion flattens the contours of curiosity, and one wonders what Helen Vendler—who proposed the sequence as 'controlled experiments in sensation'—would make of it.
One of the main achievements of Lucasta Miller’s enlightening guide to the poems and their creator is to banish the sentimental image to which Shelley’s 'Adonais'—published just a few months after Keats’s death by a poet who scarcely knew him—contributed much with its self-serving lament for an ethereal spirit destroyed by a hostile press ... Miller’s approach works perfectly for a general reader like myself, using nine of Keats’s best-loved poems to guide us ... A young man in a hurry is the figure whom Miller sets convincingly before us, too hasty to care about his spelling ... It’s thrilling to follow Miller’s demonstration of how the rapidly written 'Ode to a Nightingale' (possibly heightened by laudanum) evokes images, just as Schubert’s music uses notes, to express the indefinable. It’s startling to learn how uncertain a judge Keats was of his own work ... As a wittily perceptive introduction to (or reminder of) the poet and his work, her book is unlikely to be surpassed any time soon.
To encourage us to have another look, Miller has had the excellent idea of talking us through nine of Keats’s most famous poems and carefully unpicking some of the ideas and images in them, while giving the story of his life a shake-up at the same time ... Having the nine poems reproduced in the text is really useful, and encourages you to read them differently ... Ultimately it challenges us to make up our own minds about the self-styled ‘chamelion poet’.
A strange aspect of Lucasta Miller’s new book on Keats is her idea that the poet is not only masculine, but perhaps toxically so ... Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph is a readable guide to the poet’s life ... The book is organised around nine of Keats’s poems (all printed in full), a nice idea, but the project is hamstrung by Miller’s insistence on striking fashionable poses ... A more persistent theme is Miller’s endeavour to discover a ruder, sexier, blokier Keats ... To march a troop of note-taking moral policemen through Madeline’s 'high and triple-arch’d' casement with its glowing stained glass and 'lustrous salvers' is a strange and unsympathetic thing for a critic to do. The temptation (never perhaps more irresistible than it is today) to judge art by moral criteria is always a dangerous one, but in this instance especially. Miller’s approach ignores the poem’s essential character: its atmosphere of fantasy, of over-ripe daydreaming ... Miller is astute about the curious ambivalence of Keats’s love affair with Brawne ... [Miller's] impoverished view of literature risks reducing it to just another branch of the social sciences and is prevalent in academia at the moment. If Keats’s poems (his 'literary artefacts', as Miller occasionally terms them) are chiefly interesting merely as historical evidence for the lifestyles of young men at the beginning of the 19th century, then I suppose questions of whether he was toxically masculine do seem interesting.
The profile that historian and literary critic Lucasta Miller assembles in her engrossing Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph is a welcome corrective that seeks a truer understanding of the life and work of the iconic British poet ... Miller is an avowed Keatsian, but one of the strengths of this study is her refreshing willingness to call out the poet for some inferior writing just as often as she extols the brilliance of his more enduring masterworks ... This candor adds to rather than detracts from the affectionate picture she paints of a young man who alternated between ambition and insecurity ... Miller sharply centers his life in the context of its time, detailing the moral ambiguities and excesses of the Regency period that would later be whitewashed by the Victorians. While the U.S. publication of this superb volume misses the 200th anniversary of Keats’ death by a year, it is never a bad time to revisit a poetic genius. Miller has given us a thing of beauty, indeed.
... [a] thoughtful, personal appreciation ... Miller's up to the challenge ... she amply demonstrates why the poet’s 'voice, marginal and avant-garde in his own day, retains its vertiginous originality.' Subtly intertwining biographical detail with crisp readings of the poetry, Miller creates an insightful, vibrant portrait.
Melding biography, close reading, and personal essay, Miller creates an intimate account of Keats’s endeavor ... personal sections bring in some levity to balance her taut analysis. This penetrating and charming study will enchant Keats’s fans.
