John Keats died at the young age of 25. This collection of love letters and poetry capture the fevered passion, which seemed heightened by the social, financial, and medical obstacles in the path between these two lovers, at least from his viewpoint. I am not a huge fan of his poetry, but enjoyed the juxtaposition of the poetry and the letters. Nice. ( )

Little else I have read or will ever read, has moved, inspired and stirred my soul so deeply as this. ( )

Yes, I bought a movie tie-in. We watched the movie _Bright Star_ because of our Regency interests. I discovered John Keats as a teen thanks to a conversation at a Friendly's that also turned me on to the Durants' multi-volume Western Civ. series. I remember standing in the stacks and reading "Ode on a Grecian Urn." I think Keats is best enjoyed by the young, and those especially in the throes of love angst. This slim volume has first his letters to Fanny, most of them composed while they were in the same physical house but kept separate, and then poems composed during this period. Of them all, I found the last, "This living hand, now warm and capable" the most moving. I felt unmoved by the long pseudo-medieval and classical ballads.

So Bright and Delicate is a collection of the poet John Keats' love letters to Fanny Brawne, with a selection of his love poetry attached at the end. The book is short, around 130 pages, of which around half are letters and half poems. Even if you're indifferent to early 19th century poetry, the letters make for excellent reading, and cover the period just before the end of his life. The poems are a mixed bunch, and I will admit to being unable to force myself through "Lamia", but you should probably read "The Belle Dame sans Merci" and "The Eve of St. Agnes" at least once, just to say you have.

For those looking for a real love story, the letters will be a treat. And for those in the mood, the poetry can be good too. ( )

”Let me have another opportunity of years before me and I will not die without being remember’d” pleads John Keats in one of the thirty-seven surviving love letters he sent to his “angel”, Fanny Brawne. It was some months before his partying to Italy, where he was sent following his doctor’s advice as the last chance to survive a long, strenuous illness. He was supposed to benefit from the milder winter there. He would never return to England, dying in Rome at the premature age of twenty-five and without having ever replied to a single letter from Fanny. He wrote to his friend Mr.Brown instead explaining he could not bear to write to her knowing that he would never see her again in this life. Fanny’s unopened letters were buried with him in Rome, where a simple stone pays homage to him, with no name engraved, only the words “Here lies one whose name was writ in water” , as he requested.

Keats’s spell has gone very deep for me. This short collection of letters and poems has left me emotionally drained, they bear compelling witness to Keats’s tenderness, passion, genius and vulnerability. It was sometime during the spring of 1819, the one he spent next to Fanny, that Keats experienced the great outpouring of his poetic life, managing to write about love with the only authority he ever accepted, that of experience itself. It was also the year he fell mortally sick.

"You are to me an object intensely desirable – the air I breathe in a room empty of you is unhealthy."
Letter sent to Fanny from Kentish Town, preparing for his trip to Italy, 1819.

Keats published only fifty-four poems in three slim volumes and, in spite of achieving little public notoriety during his brief life, I believe him to be the quintessential British poet of all times. Keats’s grace, which is sometimes nearly “humoristic”, along with his verbal skill and his dry wit can take by surprise any reader who believed him to be the unmanly, delicate poet, at first glance innocent, he seemed to be. We can sense some of this ingenious playfulness in his short poem called "On Fame”.

Fame, like a wayward girl, will still be coy
To those who woo her with too slavish knees,
But makes surrender to some thoughtless boy,
And dotes the more upon a heart at ease;
She is a Gipsey, - will not speak to those
Who have not learnt to be content without her.

And if one bothers to look deeper, he will discover an unknown, exotic Keats. An acute poet who plays with his own expressive virtuosity, creating poetry from poetizing, without an inch of seriousness or philosophical pretensions, his verses appear charged with irony, impregnating the reader with flashing tastes of melancholy. Taking Wordsworth, Milton and Shakespeare for inspiration, Keats’s mature sense makes the career of the artist become an exploration of art’s power to bring solace and meaning to human suffering.
His four Odes are perfect examples of the way his poems, through a highly self-conscious art, embody meditation on desire and its fulfilment and also on wishes, dreams, and romance.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?
Ode to a Nightingale

Keats mastered an unusual willingness to embrace uncertainty, live with mystery and make peace with ambiguity, a term which has been called Negative Capability, in which the poet is able to forget about his self and, in vacating his mind, he can fully succumb into the intensity of countless experiences, creating poems out of them. It’s in this fashion that the reader can “feel” rather than “read” Keats’s verses because they don’t struggle with aesthetic form but for meaning against the limits of experience, and always with the under shadowing presence of death behind beauty.

Their sorrows. Pale were the sweet lips I saw,
Pale were the lips I kissed, and fair the form
I floated with, about that melancholy storm.
A Dream, after reading Dante’s Episode of Paolo and Francesca.

Keats’s relationship to Fanny Brawne has tantalized generations of lovers of his poetry, moved and shocked them by their frank passion and intense feelings. I count myself among them. His letters and poems, are all part of the alchemy that makes Keats so special. The young man who died devastated, convinced that he would be forgotten, has been repeatedly re-discovered and remains immortal in the pulsating hearts of all the readers who ache and delight in the way in which beauty reveals the subtle truth behind Keats’s distressing verses. Keats rests in peace knowing he left this earthly world more beloved than most of us will ever be.

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—

Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,

The moving waters at their priestlike task

Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,

Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask

Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--

No--yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,

Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,

To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,

Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
S
till, still to hear her tender-taken breath,

And so live ever--or else swoon to death.
Bright Star, dedicated to Fanny Brown. ( )