The life mask of John Keats, taken by his friend Benjamin Robert Haydon in December of 1816, when the twenty-year-old poet had only five years to live, reveals a face which even in forced repose seems suffused with sentience. The eyes, whose exact color none of his friends could later remember but whose flashing vivacity none of them ever forgot, are pressed shut while the surface of the skin over the taut rondure of the cheeks and the strangely emphatic mouth appears to breathe life in through every pore with what Keats himself once called “atoms of perception.” The face is disturbingly beautiful; it is a face entirely lacking in those inexpressive tracts, those little fens of inertia, that often mark human features. Keats’s mobility of expression, which all his friends and acquaintances noted as well, is stilled by the grip of plaster and yet there persists a tremulous sense of what I can only term caesura, as though the poet’s...

 

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Andrew Motion
Keats
Farrar Straus & Giroux (T), 636 pages, $35.00
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