Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph

*A BOOK TO LOOK FORWARD TO IN 2021 IN THE TIMES, FINANCIAL TIMES, DAILY MAIL, SUNDAY TIMES AND GUARDIAN * The epitaph John Keats composed for his own gravestone - 'Here lies one whose name was writ in water' - seemingly damned him to oblivion. *A BOOK TO LOOK FORWARD TO IN 2021 IN THE TIMES, FINANCIAL TIMES, DAILY MAIL, SUNDAY TIMES AND GUARDIAN * The epitaph John Keats composed for his own gravestone - 'Here lies one whose name was writ in water' - seemingly damned him to oblivion. When he died at the age of twenty-five, having taken a battering from the conservative press, few critics imagined he would be considered one of the great English poets two hundred years later, though he himself had an inkling. In this brief life, Lucasta Miller takes Keats's best-known poems - the ones you are most likely to have read - and excavates their backstories. In doing so, she resurrects the real Keats: a lower-middle-class outsider from a tragic and dysfunctional family, whose extraordinary energ