Lives of the Dead Poets by Karen Swann - 9780823284184

Lives of the Dead PoetsKeats, Shelley, Coleridge\nAuthor(s): Karen Swann\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Fordham University Press, United States\nImprint: Fordham University Press\nISBN-13: 9780823284184, 978-0823284184\nSynopsis\nAny 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 materialsdeath masks, bits of bone, locks of hair, a heartinitially preserved by circles and then circulating more widely, often in tandem with bits of the literary corpus.\n 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.