Saturday, March 27, 2010

My hero / John Keats by Helen Dunmore


MY HERO

John Keats by Helen Dunmore

 

Helen Dunmore
Saturday 27 March 2010

"Talking of Pleasure, this moment I was writing with one hand, and with the other holding to my Mouth a Nectarine – good God, how fine. It went down soft, pulpy, slushy, oozy – all its delicious embonpoint melted down my throat like a large beatified Strawberry."

Whereas Byron drank soda water to preserve his figure and Shelley wrote a treatise on the natural diet, Keats ate his nectarine, and we taste it 200 years later. Keats was always the man for me. I read his letters in my mid-teens, before I knew much of his poetry. He was warm, earthy, self-mocking, funny and endlessly interested in gossip, weaving a brilliant weft under and over the letters' darker warp of sickness, death and mental anguish.

In the Keats-Shelley house in Rome, you can stand in Keats's bedroom and see the flowers on the ceiling that he saw when he lay dying. All the furniture was burned, as it had to be by law, because he had died of tuberculosis. He'd foreseen the whole ugly business from the first moment that he coughed up arterial blood, because his medical training forbade self-deception as much as his nature forbade self-pity. "I cannot be deceived in that colour; – that drop of blood is my death-warrant; – I must die."

The words reveal an essential toughness. Keats sees things as they are, with all their contradictions. He moves within a few lines from a joke about Winchester's fresh-flannelled doorsteps to the news that he has been writing the "Ode to Autumn". He remarks ironically, in one of his most agonised letters: "The knowledge of contrast, feeling for light and shade, all that information (primitive sense) necessary for a poem, are great enemies to the recovery of the stomach."

When I first read these words I barely understood them, but all the same there was a shock of recognition. At school, poems were all about meaning, and that didn't correspond to what I experienced when I tried to write them. Keats knew that you could write with a nectarine in one hand, and the juice would run into a poem.


THE GUARDIAN




2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016





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