Learn more
These promotions will be applied to this item:
Some promotions may be combined; others are not eligible to be combined with other offers. For details, please see the Terms & Conditions associated with these promotions.
Your Memberships & Subscriptions

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
John Keats: Poetry, Life & Landscapes Kindle Edition
John Keats is one of Britain’s best-known and most-loved poets. Despite dying in Rome in 1821, at the age of just twenty-five, his poems continue to inspire generations who reinterpret and reinvent the ways in which we consume his work.
Apart from his long association with Hampstead, North London, he has not previously been known as a poet of ‘place’ in the way we associate Wordsworth with the Lake District, for example, and for many years readers considered Keats’s work remote from political and social context. Yet Keats was acutely aware of and influenced by his surroundings: Hampstead; Guy’s Hospital in London where he trained as a doctor; Teignmouth where he nursed his brother Tom; a walking tour of the Lake District and Scotland; the Isle of Wight; the area around Chichester and in Winchester, where his last great ode, “To Autumn,” was composed.
Suzie Grogan takes the reader on a journey through Keats’s life and landscapes, introducing us to his best and most influential work. Utilizing primary sources such as Keats’s letters to friends and family and the very latest biographical and academic work, it offers an accessible way to see Keats through the lens of the places he visited and aims to spark a lasting interest in the real Keats—the poet and the man.
“Warm and worthwhile observations on how places as varied as the Lake District and the Isle of Wight shaped Keats’s verse.” —Camden New Journal
Customers who bought this item also bought
Product details
- ASIN : B08SR94FML
- Publisher : Pen & Sword History (March 3, 2021)
- Publication date : March 3, 2021
- Language : English
- File size : 55.1 MB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 222 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #640,787 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Suzie Grogan is a London-born writer, researcher and editor, publishing on the subjects of health (focusing on mental health), women's issues and social and literary history. She is currently working on further commissions for Pen and Sword Books and in her spare time she dabbles in fiction and has her own imprint, Mickleden Press. See her website at www.suziegrogan.co.uk.
Married with two children - one a philosopher, one a high jumper - she lives in Brittany but has her heart in the Lake District and London. Her long-standing passion for poetry, especially John Keats, has led to the wicked rumour that there are three people in her marriage....
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonTop reviews from the United States
Top reviews from other countries
- DebbieReviewed in the United Kingdom on February 23, 2021
5.0 out of 5 stars Absorbing and enlightening biography with a difference
The beautiful cover and concept of this book had me keen to read it long before it was launched, and as soon as it arrived I became completely absorbed by it. It is many books in one: a personal response to Keats as a person and a poet by a lifelong admirer; a travelogue on a dual timescale, visiting Keats' haunts in his day and our own; and a 21st century reappraisal of Keats as a major literary figure, debunking the longstanding popular image of him as a feeble, bedridden consumptive.
Perhaps reading this in lockdown, after shielding for a year, I was a particularly ripe target for a book like this, but I have also always been an admirer of Keats' poetry since first encountering it at school, and this book helped me expand my own understanding and appreciation of the beauty and character of his work, and of his importance in the canon of English literature.
I'm now adding some of the destinations in this book to my bucket-list of post-lockdown travel, and in the meantime I've dusted off my old Keats Everyman hardback from my university days, to revisit his poetry with a better context for appreciating it after reading this engrossing and often poignant book. Highly recommended.
- JGBReviewed in Australia on March 4, 2021
5.0 out of 5 stars An engaging book about John Keats, his life, times, and locations
John Keats as a person (and as a poet, and a letter-writer) is easy to love; his contemporaries found it so, and readers have continued to fall for him ever since. Suzie Grogan certainly did, and I did, too.
In her Introduction, Grogan quotes Keats as saying, “We read fine things but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the Author.” Keats was talking metaphorically, about empathy and life experience – but maybe he would have understood we Locations Geeks who enjoy tracking down the places he knew, and literally following in his footsteps. Some of those places and their treasures have been carefully preserved, while others have been significantly changed or even destroyed – but they all offer experiences and perceptions that enhance even the driest sentence in a biography and help bring it to three-dimensional life.
The first (and most substantial) part of this book is a lively biography of Keats, of the places he visited and the writings (both poems and letters) they inspired. Along the way we are given glimpses of Grogan’s own developing understanding of him and his work, from her teenage years, through her own serious health challenges, and into maturity. Chapters are organised mainly by location and then by chronology, so that we are not following Keats through time so much as through place; a deft way to handle his many to-ings and fro-ings.
The whole is lightly written and easy to read, but full of insight, and it conveys a great sense of Keats the man. It even begins with a consideration of the portraits and written descriptions of him by his friends, so that we might see him in our mind’s eye while we accompany him on his travels. For anyone new to Keats, I suggest this is an excellent place to start. There are weightier and more scholarly biographies, but Grogan admirably shows why it’s worth making the effort to read them as well.
The second part of the book provides a few paragraphs on each of those in the Keats Circle who’ve been mentioned during the earlier parts of the book. The focus is still firmly on Keats, however, and on these people’s influence on his life and work and on his later fame and reputation. This is followed by a chronology of key dates, copies of some key poems, and a bibliography.
Highly recommended to those new to John Keats, and to those who already consider themselves a “Friend of Keats”.
Note: I received a PDF ARC from the publisher, and my Keats Locations website is mentioned kindly in the Acknowledgements. But I was always going to be an Ideal Reader for this work, so you may take any gushing as a genuine response. (And I’ve already pre-ordered a hardback copy for myself.)
- J. P. S. MayReviewed in the United Kingdom on April 13, 2022
5.0 out of 5 stars Travels with Keats
This book explores the life of Keats through his travels and reveals the real man behind the stereotypical sensitive but ill poet of myth. It's an eye-opener to know that John Keats was the son of Moorgate publicans and then trained as a surgeon at Guy's Hospital, having to cut up bodies and amputate limbs in very basic conditions. Keats travelled to lots of interesting places in his short life and Grogan has something illuminating to say about all of them as she follows the poet in motion; at home in Hampstead, Oxford, the Isle of Wight, Teignmouth, a lengthy trip through the Lake District encountering sublime views, dodgy pubs with bed bugs and failing to find Wordsworth at home, on through Scotland and an ill-advised trek through Ireland which affected his health, Chichester, Winchester and that final tragic end in Rome. A very enjoyable read.
- MR J F INDReviewed in the United Kingdom on June 8, 2021
5.0 out of 5 stars Evocative journey in Keats footsteps
Keats footsteps, Grogan’s shoes. The life, friends and key work of Keats. An accessible and informative tour for anyone new to Keats, and a new perspective for those already in thrall. I very much enjoyed this book, it keeps its pace and rhythm right up to Keat’s premature and terribly sad death, while bringing his art and life together elegantly. Perhaps at times a little too much focus on how the modern landscape of trunk roads, Costa coffee and litter was void of any historical resonance, and I would have liked Grogan to give us more of a story arc on the personal reflections / final enlightenment of her own pilgrimage. Great read overall; read it to discover or be drawn closer to Keats. (Also a beautiful cover for the bookshelf)
- Lucienne BoyceReviewed in the United Kingdom on April 26, 2021
5.0 out of 5 stars An intensely personal, but also well informed, book
Suzie Grogan shares her experiences of following in Keats’s footsteps in Hampstead, Oxford, the Isle of Wight and elsewhere; her responses to his poetry; and its influence on her life. This is an intensely personal book, but it is also well-informed, containing numerous references to scholarly and biographical work on Keats. It includes useful biographical information, pen portraits of family, friends and lovers, and some of his poems. The style is direct, honest and unpretentious, as well as a no-nonsense rejection of the stereotypical image of Keats as the frail, sickly romantic. It's a lovely read, both a paean to Keats and to poetry itself. [Disclosure: the author is known to me but this is my honest opinion of the book.]