Volume 1, Number 5 · October 31, 1963
Keats
By Al Alvarez
John Keats
by Walter Jackson Bate
Harvard, 732 pp., $10.00
John Keats: The Making of a Poet
by Aileen Ward
Viking, 450 pp., $7.50
Compared with Keats himself, Shakespeare was lucky. Since we know so little of his life, we are forced to stick to his work. And that, mercifully, is enough to make all the diaries and laundry bills in the world irrelevant. Not so with Keats: his biography is insistent, inescapable. After all, he himself contributed so much towards it in his voluminous letters. And what he left out was filled in by the memoirs of his friends, their bickering and gossip, which raise a dust that almost chokes the poems.
Review, 1828 words
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