Showing results for "John Keats" in Art & Literature

Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling, John Donne was incapable of being just one thing. He was a scholar of law, a sea adventurer, an MP, a priest, the Dean of St Paul's Cathedral—and perhaps the greatest love poet in the history of the English language. He converted from Catholicism to Protestantism, was imprisoned for marrying a high-born girl without her father's consent, struggled to feed a family of 10 children and was often ill and in pain.

John Keats died 200 years ago, in February 1821. F. Scott Fitzgerald defined a decade that began 100 years ago, the Jazz Age. In this biography, prizewinning author Jonathan Bate recreates these two shining, tragic lives in parallel. Not only was Fitzgerald profoundly influenced by Keats, titling Tender Is the Night and other works from the poet’s lines, but the two lived with echoing fates: both died young, loved to drink, were plagued by tuberculosis, were haunted by their first love and wrote into a new decade of release, experimentation and decadence.

A personal insight in to the life of John Keats, his thoughts, his friends, where was his life going?...his poetry said it all. He was a hothead, short to temper, but so completely focused on becoming a poet, he had a vision, an image of himself. Fashion mattered, frilly cuffs mattered and he was prepared for fisticuffs on the streets or a brawl at the local theatre. His time in Devon was the summer in his life for the most part - though it rained most of the time. His brother and the girls from the shop across the way, were young, free, and so enjoying their precious time together.