Lives of the Dead Poets: Keats, Shelley, Coleridge
Karen Swann, "Lives of the Dead Poets: Keats, Shelley, Coleridge "
English | ISBN: 0823284174 | 2019 | 192 pages | PDF | 1038 KB
English | ISBN: 0823284174 | 2019 | 192 pages | PDF | 1038 KB
Any reader engaging the work of Keats, Shelley, or Coleridge must confront the role biography has played in the canonization of each. Each archive is saturated with stories of the life prematurely cut off or, in Coleridge’s case, of promise wasted in indolence. One confronts reminiscences of contemporaries who describe subjects singularly unsuited to this world, as well as still stranger materials―death masks, bits of bone, locks of hair, a heart―initially preserved by circles and then circulating more widely, often in tandem with bits of the literary corpus.
Especially when it centers on the early deaths of Keats and Shelley, biographical interest tends to be dismissed as a largely Victorian and sentimental phenomenon that we should by now have put behind us. And yet a line of verse by these poets can still trigger associations with biographical detail in ways that spark pathos or produce intimations of prolepsis or fatality, even for readers suspicious of such effects. Biographical fascination―the untoward and involuntary
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