Lives of the Dead Poets : Keats, Shelley, Coleridge

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 clinging of attention to the biographical subject—is thus “posthumous” in Keats’s evocative sense of the term, its life equivocally sustained beyond its period. 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. "Lives of the Dead Poets explores the biographical interest that has marked the posthumous reception of John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It argues that this fascination with the poetic life--a special case of the attachments we form to poetic figures--speaks to the mode of poetry's survival into modernity"-- Provided by publisher Cover 1 LIVES OF THE DEAD POETS 2 Title 4 Copyright 5 Dedication 6 Contents 8 Introduction 10 1. Tracing Keats 38 2. The Art of Losing: Shelley’s Adonais 62 3. Shelley’s Pod People 85 4. Late Coleridge 101 5. Coleridge the Talker 124 Coda 142 Acknowledgments 146 Notes 148 Index 178 About the Author 187