John Keats - Ironman (Who Knew?!)

Have just finished "Walking North with Keats" (Yale University Press, 1992) by the aptly named Carol Kyros Walker.  The poet had taken the walk in 1818 with his good friend Charles Armitage Brown through England, Ireland and Scotland.  Ms. Walker retraced that walk and documented it with understated lovely photographs as well as commentary on the letters and poems Keats wrote to his ailing brother Tom and semi-cloistered sister.

One thinks of Keats as being this delicate, fragile hummingbird given that he died at age 25, but there he was on this trip hiking 5, 10, 20 miles a day!  And mind you, this is before Gore-Tex and Timberlands and toasty fleecy pullovers; when one got wet one stayed wet.  Which, of course, is what happened--Keats took a nasty chill on Mull and really never completely recovered from it, dying 3 years later.

What stayed with this reader, though, was the purpose of the trip.  Keats had trained to be a physician (apparently in those days it was just an apprenticeship), but, as we know, wanted to be a poet.  Walker says Keats saw the journey as a sort of Poet's Apprenticeship--a way to shake off the his previous life and to enter fully into his new profession.

Alors, moi aussi.  Welcome to the first post on Anyone's Cockatoo.