Word: reader
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Keats's life, already tre subject of four major studies, holds a peculiar fascination for both the general reader and the aspiring writer. For the first there is grand, poignant drama in the tragic story of the neglected genius, his famous love affair with Fanny Brawne, and his death of consumption at twenty-five. Even more, there is the charm of the man himself as be appears in his poems and letters and his friends' reminiscences--warm, sensitive and noble, the most Shakespearean of modern poets...
...month, spending much time in bed." And Bate treats the familiar questions of Keats scholarship--his medical history, his finances, the effect of the Endymion reviews--with an informed common sense that never collapses into pedantry. Even his analyses of the poetry, although rigorously technical, provoke the most inattentive reader to a new understanding of the great Odes (particularly the "Ode to a Nightingale") and the epic fragments...
...kind. For all its erudition and its technicality, all its grace and intelligence, the quality most to be valued in John Keats is that as biography it can, in Johnson's words, be "put to use." John Keats can be used by writer and critic, scholar and interested reader--used as a fascinating guide to literature and to a man of literary genius. It demonstrates that no field of study, when well loved and well understood, can be exhausted. One would almost as soon have written Bate's book as Keats's poetry...
...fairly good rule of thumb to avoid books that come in cardboard slipcases, just as a practiced reader automatically avoids the memoirs of actresses, novels described by their publishers as heartwarming, and books given prepublication endorsements by Clifton Fadiman. The rule is not absolute, but more often than not the contents of a slipcase either have calcified into the classic condition or are so fragile that they need an especially strong container to keep them from crumbling. Most of Janet Frame's stories, sketches and fables in these two prettily boxed booklets fit the second case...
...Avenue may still make young men angry, but who is mad at the Episcopal Church? It is not even, like its parent body within the Anglican Communion, Established. Paris Leary, a 32-year-old poet, has rashly ignored all of these considerations in a first novel that invites the reader to share his evident hilarity at High Anglican priests, parishioners and monks at a small college town in upstate New York...