Beauty that must die
Review by Ian Thomson
A fine biography that seeks to revise our image of a great poet-physician too frail for this lifeJohn Keats: A New Life, by Nicholas Roe, Yale University Press, RRP£25, 384 pages
"It might make one in love with death,” declared Shelley, “to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.” Keats, on his deathbed, hearing that daisies grew wild on the graves there, rejoiced, saying that he already felt the flowers “growing over” him. They were referring to the Protestant cemetery in Rome, which could be a drowsy churchyard in the English counties were it not for the cypresses and cicadas. It is appropriate that Keats, with his Romantic attachment to classical Italy, should lie here, a few tombs from Shelley, himself a poet captivated by the warm south. When Shelley drowned off Italian shores in 1822, a volume of Keats was found in his pocket."
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