Lives of the Dead Poets: Keats, Shelley, Coleridge

This is one of the most exquisitely-crafted books I have ever had the privilege of reading. Swann sets out to complicate the idea that biographical fascination is simply retrograde, sentimental, canonizing, or ideological; she shows how our fascination with these poets is bound up with the way they seem to live on past natural life, suspended in a kind of posthumous time. With modesty, tact, yet also with the assurance of a deeply felt calling, this book addresses the largest questions that we face as readers of literature.-Marc Redfield, Brown UniversitySwann is possessed of a prose style that is both clear and, at times, breath-takingly surprising. A beautifully conceived, organized, and written study.-Adela Pinch, University of MichiganAny 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.Lives of the Dead Poets takes seriously the biographical fascination that has dogged the prematurely arrested figures of three romantic poets. Arising in tandem with a sense of the threatened end of poetry's allotted period, biographical fascination personalizes the precariousness of poetry, binding poetry, the poet-function, and readers to an irrecuperable singularity. Reading romantic poets together with the modernity of Benjamin and Baudelaire, Swann shows how poets' afterlives offer an opening for poetry's survival, from its first nineteenth-century death sentences into our present. Karen Swann is Morris Professor of Rhetoric Emerita in the Williams College English Department. She currently teaches at Bard Microcollege Holyoke.