Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.latimes.misc From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: FICTION Date: Mon, 9 Nov 92 07:02:32 EST Message-ID: HEADLINE: FICTION Publication Date: Sunday November 8, 1992 BYLINE: Merle Rubin WALKING NORTH WITH KEATS text and photographs by Carol Kyros Walker (Yale University Press: $35; 246 pp., illustrated) . The Romantic passion for wild, rugged landscapes and picturesque ruins (like Dundrennan Abbey, above) set 22-year-old John Keats and his friend Charles Brown on a walking tour of northern England, Ireland and Scotland in June of 1818. The fledgling poet had envisioned the journey as "a sort of Prologue to the Life I intend to pursue." Damp sheets, poor food, inclement weather and a worsening sore throat (which proved to be the onset of the tuberculosis that killed him less than three years later) cut short the trip in August but that autumn was the beginning of the poet's annus mirabilis , the miraculous year in which he wrote his masterpieces: "The Eve of St. Agnes," the two "Hyperions," "Lamia," "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," and the great odes: "Ode to Psyche," Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on Melancholy" and "To Autumn." Walking with her camera and backpack at the same time of year, stopping at the same spots, even taking her photographs from the five-foot-tall poet's angle of vision, artist and English professor Carol Kyros Walker has attempted to retrace Keats' and Brown's steps. Wisely, she does not rely on pictures alone (these prove merely satisfactory). She also furnishes a map, an itinerary, and texts of the pithy letters and meandering verse dashed off en route, concluding with Brown's account of the trip published nearly 20 years after Keats' death. Walker's illuminating introduction affords an excellent and readable overview of everything from Keats' family and financial worries to the political climate of 1818. Intelligent, meticulous and totally unpretentious, this book is both a solid piece of research and an aesthetically pleasing album of Keatsiana, proving once more the viability of the Keatsian equation, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." This article is copyright 1992 The Los Angeles Times Home Edition. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. For more information, send-email to usa@AmeriCast.COM