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Cluster index: Anthony Costello

Keats: letters, home.

Anthony Costello: ‘Keats’ short and impassioned life is a continual search for home: home as place, family, friends, love, and poetry itself. Poetry is his palace of a home — a palace to which we, as readers, have access. His correspondence and 49 verse-letters show this heartfelt search is pivotal to his life and work.’

The eyes of Coleridge.

Anthony Costello: ‘Coleridge’s eye poems sets him apart from other Romantic poets. Eyes are central to dozens of important poems and present in the form of significant phrases and lines in hundreds more. They are present as basic descriptors: ‘dark disliking eye’, ‘dim eyes’, ‘bright blue eyes’, but then the adjectives become more revealing and turn into adverbs and verbs…’

Artists and their Physicians: Vincent van Gogh and Doctor Paul Gachet.

Anthony Costello and Emma Storr: ‘One interpretation of the relationship between artist and doctor is that Gachet’s life-long interest in art manifested itself in the wish fulfilment to be Vincent van Gogh, so he dressed like his patient, he tried to paint like his patient and he made a second ‘fake’ copy of the eponymous painting. He also collected his patient’s paintings, painted a deathbed scene so that his painting became synonymous with the great Vincent van Gogh in death and he became custodian of a cache of Van Gogh paintings.’

Three poems by Anthony Costello

Anthony Costello (from ‘The Antique Hunter’): cabinets of Glost earthenware
and fine bone china,
recognizing a Stradivarius or 1st
of Ulysses when I see one

Three poems by Alain-Fournier.

Alain-Fournier: Firstly…no…well…in the evening…perhaps…
I will dare to take her hand, le petit pas;
If this takes too long, and the evening is fresh,
I will speak the truth until I’m out of breath,
And her eyes will be wet with words so tender
And with no-one overhearing, she will answer.