Volume 11, Number 8 · November 7, 1968
The Living Keats
By G.M. Matthews
John Keats
by Robert Gittings
Atlantic-Little, Brown, 469 pp., $8.95
A classic case-history of a delinquent. The parents' not quite approved marriage and their first child's not quite unambiguous gestation; his early years knocking about at the 'Swan and Hoop,' an inn that was also a kind of Regency car park; a bottle-loving father killed in a Saturday night road accident when the boy was eight; a man-loving mother who promptly married again and farmed out her previous family to granny, but took it back when her second marriage broke up, only to die of tuberculosis while her adoring son was still in his teens; disturbed periods at school; vindictive lawsuits that kept the relatives at each others' throats and the family in a perpetual state of impoverishment and bitterness. And then years of apprenticeship, precariously dependent on trustees amid a set of free-living medical students. Yet the end product was not a criminal but the author of the line, 'The poetry of earth is never dead,' a young man who for generations of readers was the founder of a religion of Beauty. He didn't even go in for drugs, which is more than can be said of some contemporary poets who had not enjoyed the same disadvantages.
Review, 2245 words
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