Magic Casements

Poetry should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. --John Keats

"Oh fer cryin' out loud, stop with the Keats." Well, no. I was rereading the odes last night, particularly Nightingale...& it's his birthday. What a good excuse to put in some stills from Jane Campion's Bright Star. (The blueandpurple is swoony.) Click on the Bright Star link...it's Jane Campion's interactive production site--storyboards, rehearsal video, production design images, & the like. I still search for photographs of the director's cat, Topper who plays, well, the Cat. (He's a brilliant scene stealer.)

From today's The Writer's Almanac:

It's the birthday of the poet John Keats, (books by this author) born in London (1795), who was just starting his career as a poet in 1818 when a series of brutally negative reviews of his first two books appeared. And then, that same year, Keats learned that his brother was dying of tuberculosis. Keats spent the last few months of 1818 taking care of his brother, who died a few weeks before Christmas. In the wake of his brother's death, Keats moved into a duplex with a friend, and in the other half of the duplex lived a beautiful 18-year-old girl named Fanny Brawne, who became the love of his life. He declared his love to her soon after they met, but he decided not to marry her until he'd secured his reputation as a great poet.