‘Keats’ Review: Truth, Beauty, Sex and Drugs

We tend to think of John Keats as, in Lucasta Miller’s provocative phrase, “the most romantic of the Romantic poets.” He’s the pure soul—so the legend goes—who died at only 25, penniless, passionately in love with a woman he couldn’t ever hope to marry because of his tuberculosis and convinced that he would be completely forgotten. (The epitaph he chose for his gravestone reads “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”) Keats’s eminently quotable poetry (“A thing of beauty is a joy forever”; “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”) has of course not been forgotten at all but is studied throughout the English-speaking world not just for its technical and linguistic skill but as a repository of philosophical insight about everything that’s most deeply felt in human experience, from love to loss to our own mortality. Somehow the fact that Keats died so young, yet loved so intensely and wrote so well, has given him a sage-like status.