The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the Podglamorate Network and LIT Hub Radio.

Hello.

So now that we've done a few hundred episodes of this podcast I feel compelled to look

across the literary universe and think about the writers I haven't covered. The bright

stars in the sky some of the very brightest, who have not yet been

subject to the sustained gaze of the little earthling, the puny earthling named Jack Wilson in his History of Literature podcast.

Sometimes I discover a new author or an overlooked writer or a new angle on a classic work. The subject matter calls out to me and I respond.

Yes, yes, time to dive in. Other authors have always been there. They're out there waiting, as

patient as the hills or mountains. Even more patient than those hills, aren't they?

fixtures on the landscape. Even more patient than those hills, aren't they?

fixtures on the landscape, calling to us through the distance.

Standing there.

I am here to be climbed, Jack, when you are ready.

And you know the heights to which you can travel on me.

You know the air you will breathe up here.

Today's subject is a little like that and yet he came from almost nothing, not nothing, as is often thought. Almost nothing.

And he died before he turned 26. A meteor, a comet in life perhaps, in poetry

in our poetic firmament in the heavens of poetry written at the very highest level.

We can call him a bright star.

Which of course is what he himself called Shakespeare.

Keats looked back to Shakespeare after first going through Spencer, which made him want to be

a poet, and reading contemporaries like Lee Hunt and Worsworth and Coleridge and

...