Writers & Books

John Keats, who died at the age of twenty-five, had perhaps the most remarkable career of any English poet. He published only fifty-four poems, in three slim volumes and a few magazines. But at each point in his development he took on the challenges of a wide range of poetic forms from the sonnet, to the Spenserian romance, to the Miltonic epic, defining anew their possibilities with his own distinctive fusion of earnest energy, control of conflicting perspectives and forces, poetic self-consciousness, and, occasionally, dry ironic wit. In the case of the English ode he brought its form, in the five great odes of 1819, to its most perfect definition.

The greatest biographies and studies of this great man remain those by:

James Boswell (to this day, probably the most famous, renowned biography of any person, living or dead). I confess I found it really only became alive from 1763 onwards, when Boswell first met him and then began scrupulously to take detailed notes of - he claimed - verbatim conversations with Johnson - so many of the best anecdotes about Johnson and situations are those where Boswell was in attendance.

W. Jackson Bate

James Clifford

John Wain

Christopher Hibbert

John Hawkins