Keats’s Letter to Richard Woodhouse, October 27, 1818

Anyone who has read this neglected Blog (a miserable seven posts since 2016!) or follows me on my seemingly better-loved Twitter account will know that I adore the life & writings of John Keats.  I won’t call it an obsession—I have enough of those!—for it makes me sound psychotic or like some knee-crooking fanboy, and Keats deserves better than that.  No, but perhaps it’s that I understand him, that I feel a sort of knowing yet unconscious sensitivity to his writing that I share with none other—and though this understanding and sensitivity fills the emptiness in my life with beauty, it too haunts that same emptiness with mystery and melancholy.

For me, and for many others, Keats’s letters are as poetical and fascinating as his poetry.  T.S. Eliot called his letters “the most notable and the most important ever written by any English poet.”  Although my unflinching and unapologetic bias agrees wholeheartedly with Eliot, I don’t think it’s that extreme of a statement when one considers Keats’s age when he wrote them—it seems many people forget that Keats died at only 25 years old, while the most beautiful and mysterious of his letters and poetry were written years before that.  My letters & emails written during my early twenties are the “most unpoetical of anything in existence” (and I mean this in a bad way!) and deserve a far more torturous fate than simply being burned or deleted.  Unfortunately and fortunately for me, my so called enlightenment occurred in my mid-twenties and most of my writings before that were logical and unimaginative nonsense.  Sure, I knew of poetry and literature during that time of my life, but I simply had different interests and goals then, and my Muse was not yet whispering as much to me then, and Her loving stranglehold had not yet brought me to my knees…