Imprinted Life discussion

Keats by Andrew Motion

In this biography of Keats, the former Poet Laureate of England Andrew Motion interprets Keats' poems and life in their social-political contexts. The reference for the poems are John Barnard's "John Keats: The Complete Poems" (2nd edition, 1976) and Hyder Edward Rollins' "The Letters of John Keats 1814-1821".

The cover image by Keats's close friend Joseph Severn imagines the poet listening in the woods for the birdsong in "Ode to a Nightingale". In addition there are a frontispiece, seventy-three plates, and twenty-three text illustrations.

Keats (1795-1821) wrote among other poems "Hyperion", "Isabella, or the Pot of Basil", "Endymion", "On Seeing the Elgin Marbles", "The Eve of St Agnes", "Lamia", and the six odes of 1819.

All in all, this biography offers a view of Keats, different from previous biographies.

Two Keatsian places for visitors and scholars

There's the Keats' house in Hampstead London and the Keats-Shelley house beside the Spanish Steps in Rome.

The eldest child of Thomas Keats and Frances Jennings, John Keats (1795-1821) lived during England's Georgian and Regency eras, periods of great transformation for all areas of English life and society from commerce to culture. Because those things interested Keats, his biographer Andrew Motion is detailed in his explanation about that time, as if you actually lived then. Society was divided among those who benefited from the new order and those whom it affected, London being its microcosm, says the story.