A Name Not Writ in Water
Mar 01, 2022
4 minutes
Review by A. E. Stallings
KEATS: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph
BY LUCASTA MILLER
Knopf, 368 pp., $32.50
THERE IS SOMETHING irresistible about John Keats’s poignantly brief life and his outsize greatness as an artist. That such a wealth of material about him exists—his own astonishing letters as well as reminiscences and diaries of his friends—means that there has never been a shortage of biographies. Vignettes began appearing soon after Keats’s death in 1821, with the first full biography, by Richard Monckton Milnes (a Victorian politician, failed suitor of Florence Nightingale, and avid collector of erotica), appearing in 1848. More recent lives of the poet include works by Amy Lowell (1924),
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