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Rosamund Taylor's Reviews > Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph

Keats by Lucasta Miller
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I rarely read biography, so I'm not sure that I am the best placed to judge it. I knew little about Keats' life before I read this, and it was interesting to learn about his brief life, especially his relatively humble origins, his training as a doctor, and his impressive focus on his work as a poet. High-achieving in school, Keats was apprenticed to an apothecary at age 14, and was later trained in Guys hospital in London. He spent the last five years of his life focusing on his passion for poetry, before his death from tuberculosis at age 25, and in that short time, wrote poems that have become central to our understanding of English literature. Lucasta Miller chooses nine of his poems, and uses them as starting point to tell the readers about Keats' life, as well as exploring the context and meaning of the poems. At times, Miller's prose can be clunky, awkward and repetitive, and I wondered why she phrased things so badly. As the content of the book was engaging, this was very disappointing. Also, as literary criticism, I found this lacking in scope, as her interest is so much on what we can learn about Keats' life from the poems, whereas I would rather she paid more attention to the form and music of the work itself. But it's nice to include them in this book, and I found the biographical details vividly told and well-rooted in primary sources. A good introduction to Keats.
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Reading Progress

April 3, 2024 – Started Reading
April 7, 2024 – Shelved
April 7, 2024 – Shelved as: biography
April 7, 2024 – Finished Reading

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