John Keats: A New: Life by Nicholas Roe
2015; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 54; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/srm.2015.0036
ISSN2330-118X
Autores Tópico(s)Literature: history, themes, analysis
Resumo138 BOOK REVIEWS Bloom’s conclusion, as Goodridge documents with great precision). In most of these cases his biography is the pivot upon which the criticism turns. Goodridge draws a fair amount on Clare’s own life, but his precise and thorough reading of the work balances out those tenuous moments that Goodridge rightly calls the “psycho-biographical,” when the author must rely on his imagination to fill in the blanks. At times the connections made between Clare and other poets feels unconvincing, as when Clare’s bold adjectival phrases are read as “inherited in part from eighteenthcentury georgic via Bloomfield” (95), and in a few moments the author’s psycho-biographical work risks undermining Clare’s struggle with mental health. When Clare claimed to be Byron and Shakespeare, Goodridge ar gues, he may have been doing so metaphorically or “as an understandable fantasy”; one worries over the danger of remaking a debilitating illness into an aesthetic or political stance. Still, these moments reveal Goodridge’s desire to place Clare properly within his historical and aesthetic context and to do so with a comprehen sive, holistic eye. If scholarship about Clare has vacillated between dismiss ing him in the context of the other Romantic poets and fixating on his bi ography, this book puts these approaches into productive conversation. In a treasured letter to Clare, Bloomfield wrote flatteringly about his poetry, urging him to continue writing: . . . nothing upon the great theater of what is called the world (our English world) can give me halfthe pleasure I feel at seeing a man start up from the humble walks oflife and show himself to be what I think you are.—What that, is, Ask a higher power,—for though learning is not to be contem’d it did not give you this. (87) Bloomfield’s statement about the man who “shows himself” to be what his fellow poet believes ofhim is reflected in this book. Goodridge’s important contribution to Clare studies demonstrates how, by taking equally from the “theater of the world” as from his “humble walks,” Clare’s piecemeal, dis orderly, crowd-sourced mode of inspiration yielded such deeply felt, noble work. Alison Powell Oakland University Nicholas Roe. John Keats: A Nett: Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Pp. xxvii+446. $22. On 8 July 1819 under a full moon, John Keats wrote in one of his first let ters to Fanny Brawne about a comet that was burning through the heavens SiR, 54 (Spring 2015) BOOK REVIEWS 139 over London for several consecutive nights that month, an astronomical phenomenon that he marks out emotionally as a figuration of the woman with whom he was falling deeply in love: “I have seen your Comet,” he told her (331). As Nicholas Roe explains in this pathbreaking biography of Keats, “[njight after night Fanny’s comet hung brightly overhead, appar ently as stationary and unchanging as the stars yet in reality a transient visi tor returned fleetingly from its long traverse,” a cosmological experience that, Roe suggests, likely allowed Keats to unlock his sentiments and pas sions and compose his sonnet “Bright Star” (c. 18x9), memorializing his re lationship with Brawne (331). Having conscientiously studied John Bonnycastle’s An Introduction to Astronomy (1807) during his schoolboy days at Clarke’s Academy at Enfield in suburban London, Keats had been, since his early youth, a careful watcher of the skies, and his preoccupation with the heavens and their constellations carried on even into his painful final letter to Charles Armitage Brown of 30 November 1820, less than three months before the poet died in Rome of tuberculosis in the winter of 1821, aged 25: “I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence,” wrote Keats, “There was my star predominant!” (390). Following Keats’s lead, Roe is correct to make much throughout his bi ography of the subtle yet crucial ways in which the poet came to associate his life with the heavens above him, and while this feature of Roe’s book might initially appear as simply a minor, artful motif, this aspect of the bi ography runs from the first...
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