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Lead book review

Imagining a future for John Keats — the novelist

Keats is a much stranger poet than we tend to realise – who shocked his first readers by his vulgarity and gross indecency, says Philip Hensher

6 February 2021

9:00 AM

6 February 2021

9:00 AM

Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph Lucasta Miller

Vintage, pp.368, 17.99

Keats long ago became the meaningless emblem of poetic genius. When the poet Amanda Gorman appeared at President Joe Biden’s inauguration, both detractors and admirers wanted to set her against the highest possible comparison. They didn’t reach for the US’s new Nobel laureate, Louise Glück. They went for Keats: either ‘Amanda Gorman is Keats-level brilliant’ or ‘Well, it’s not exactly Keats’.

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