A Brighter Word than Bright: Keats at Work

Poet Beachy-Quick (English, Colorado State Univ.; Circle's Apprentice) composes a concentrated examination of the life and work of English Romantic poet John Keats (1795–1821) that seeks to unearth the epistemological assumptions that appear early within Keats's work, morph and coalesce over time, and finally mature to produce the high poetry and philosophy of the majestic six odes of 1819. Portraits of the poet at different moments in his writing life alternate with ruminations on particular poems and letters and the concerns they present. Beachy-Quick views Keats's work as a dialog between the facts of history on the one side and, on the other, his poetic sensibility. The book sparkles with sudden realizations that illuminate both Keats's frame of mind and the nature of poetizing: a poem "is not an argument to convince, but an evidence of conviction" and "vision begins where direction ends." Keats wrote once that the difference between his poetry and that of his contemporary Lord Byron's was that Byron "describes what he sees, I describe what I imagine. Mine is the harder task." It's hard to leave this book without agreeing.