andrew bennett of what it means to be a poet, to have poetic sensibility, to be or to have the strangeness of genius (“Genius is so strange,” Ian Crichton Smith opines of Keats in “For Keats” [1972]12 ), and crucially to suffer critical neglect or even scorn in one’s lifetime before going to an early grave Tom Clark makes a similar point in a prefatory note to his “poetic novel” or “biography in verse” on Keats’s life, Junkets on a Sad Planet (1994), when he remarks on the way that Keats’s “conceptual proposals of the figurative aspects of a poet’s life” – proposals which emphasize “the problem of suffering” as a theme both “within and without the work” – present “a unique readout of the experience and meaning of being a modern poet.”13 Recent poetic responses to Keats also tend to suggest that the division of poet and poetry is itself something of a fragile and unstable fiction: loving the “incorruptible purity” of Keats’s words, loving his language – however we construe or describe it – is, in a sense, loving Keats, since Keats (like any other dead poet, indeed) just is language Three notable poetic sequences – Amy Clampitt’s “Voyages: A Homage to John Keats,”14 Andrew Motion’s prose and poem sequence “Sailing to Italy,”15 Clark’s Junkets on a Sad Planet – suggestively explore the inescapable imbrications of life with language, of suffering and genius with writing, emphasizing the fact that what we have of Keats, what remains of him, is only language, only the words he wrote in letters to friends and the words he wrote as poems Concerned as these collections are to question or deconstruct the oppositions between history and fiction, the present and the past, life and writing, original and copy, performance and authenticity, self and other, they seem to produce a kind of linguistic resuscitation: Clampitt, Clark, and Motion incorporate the language of Keats’s letters and his poems into their own modern texts, making new poetry out of a dead poet’s words Perhaps the most striking of these evocations is that of Amy Clampitt In “Voyages: A Homage to John Keats,” the twentieth-century poet’s response to Keats’s life is mediated by the words of his poetry and letters – as in the final two stanzas of the second poem, “Teignmouth,” for example, which describe an annus mirabilis of odes before the season of the oozing of the cider press, the harvest done, wheatfields blood-spattered once with poppies gone to stubble now, the swallows fretting to begin their windborne flight toward a Mediterranean that turned to marble as the mists closed in on the imagination’s yet untrodden region – the coal-damps, the foul winter dark of London.16 266 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008