Nicholas Roe
Last Words
Deaths of the Poets
By Paul Farley & Michael Symmons Roberts
Jonathan Cape 414pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
At Plymouth last year I visited the home of Charles Armitage Brown, John Keats’s friend and collaborator. Set back behind trees, Brown’s Regency villa resembles Wentworth Place, the home he had shared with the young poet, who died, aged twenty-five, of tuberculosis. For fifteen years Brown thought about writing a memoir of Keats, but was unable to confront the anguish of doing so. Then, settled at Plymouth in 1836, he made a start. To offset his friend’s ‘disappointment, his sorrows, and his death’, Brown began with Shelley’s Adonais, the great Romantic elegy in which Keats hastens to ‘the abode where the Eternal are’. Awaiting his arrival is the pale form of another young poet who had destroyed himself, aged seventeen, with a cocktail of opium and arsenic: Thomas Chatterton.
Poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts contend that the perilous, self-destructive lives of Chatterton and a few other Romantics initiated a myth of doomed genius: that poetic achievement comes when life is pushed fatally to its limits. This Chatterton myth, they suggest, explains the ‘skewed’ popular image of poets
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
‘He has become a kind of global guru, public intellectual and consultant to the great. He is the ultimate geopolitical gerontocrat.’
From July 2022: Piers Brendon on Henry Kissinger.
Piers Brendon - Margaret Thatcher As I Knew Her
Piers Brendon: Margaret Thatcher As I Knew Her - Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy by Henry Kissinger
literaryreview.co.uk
‘Even setting to one side the historically neuralgic relationship with ... Ireland, Britain’s insular periphery has from at least the time of the Romans presented difficulties for authorities wishing to centralise.’
Peter Marshall on Britain's islands.
Peter Marshall - Notes from the Atlantic Archipelago
Peter Marshall: Notes from the Atlantic Archipelago - The Britannias: An Island Quest by Alice Albinia
literaryreview.co.uk
Offer ends soon! Take advantage of our best ever Black Friday offer and get a year's subscription for £29.99.
https://www.mymagazinesub.co.uk/literary-review/promo/blackfriday/