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Andrew Motion's lifelong interest in John Keats recently culminated in his acclaimed biography of the poet, the first for 30 years. Ever since Shelley's Adonais presented Keats as a gilded youth driven to an early death by vitriolic reviews, this popular image has distorted reality: " All important writers need to be re-evaluated at least once every generation; just as history evolves, so different things about people become interesting and problematical, " explains Motion.
In an attempt to breach the barrier time imposes, in 1995 Motion embarked on a voyage retracing Keats' last journey to Italy in the autumn of 1820. In the final throes of tuberculosis Keats sailed from London. Leaving behind his beloved Fanny Brawne and, so he thought, all hopes of poetic immortality. Accompanied halfway by an Omnibus camera crew, Motion describes the journey as " the most interesting thing I've ever done in my life. " It did however, bring an inevitable sense of separation as well as an opportunity to empathise with his subject, as he notes in his work;" There is Keats signalling to me from 200 years away. He is writing something down, throwing it forward for me to catch. Now he is speaking… But the wind and waves drown what he says; his voice never reaches me." The book's last 50 pages- chronicling Keats' final days- have a lyrical momentum deepened by Motion's discovery of his own serious illness. Later diagnosed with a benign tumour, the experience heightened his sense of " time repeatedly running out…I did think about Keats' final illness in ways I wouldn't have usually. I'm sure that it made the book better, more intense but I thought it was carrying research too far!"
Keats initially trained as a doctor and long believed in poetry's healing capacities, an aspect the book emphasises. Motion firmly endorses this; " I can think of no higher ambition for my work than that it might be a comfort to people in moments of extremity. I have tried to write poems that address the big emotions of life." Salt Water, his 1997 volume, tackles just such universal themes as it explores both the destructive and redemptive qualities of water. At the very moment he celebrates the "dazzling cross-hatchery of traffic and currents," the image of a friend drowned on the Marchioness swirls into mind.
" My background is very unbookish indeed, " he maintains. " My father was a brewer like his brother and his grandfather before him. There were books at home but no-one read them." Motion believes the impulse to become a poet springs from an intuitive source. " In some measure, being a poet is something that's given to you. It's a primitive, visceral, purely emotional thing with me. This is why Keats' idea of diligent indolence is so valuable- creative downtime when your intellect isn't working. I write every month or six weeks and worry if I'm late!"
Today Motion maintains twin careers as poet and biographer; his authorised study of Philip Larkin, drawn from personal knowledge, won a Whitbread Prize in 1993. Larkin and Keats seem to occupy antithetical positions in the poetical spectrum: "Keats is certainly easier to live with as he said yes to life! But Larkin's poems, with their wonderful quality, depend on him saying no; you can't wish he'd cheered up because that would be fatuous!"
One biography was written from firsthand experience, the other a complete exercise of the imagination. " By knowing somebody you can believe that the version of the person you know is an adequate account of the individual and is isn't. Writing Larkin I learned that you must remind yourself that the people you know are as much strangers to you as those living in the early 19th century."
Footnote: in 1999, amidst much controversy, Motion was appointed Poet Laureate of England.
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