Uploaded January 2019 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Anthony Burgess reads 'When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be' by John Keats. He recounts the experience of reading the poem while sitting on the Spanish Steps in Rome in You've Had Your Time: 'Reciting the odes, I became aware of a kind of astral wind, a malevolent chill, of a soul chained to the place where the body died, of a silent malignant laughter that mocked not my reading but the poems themselves [...] I recited the last sonnet on the steps outside the Keats house. It was high summer, and the sky was cloudless, but within the space of fourteen lines of iambic pentameters a storm arose, the rain teemed, I and the television team were drenched, and the final couplet was drowned by thunder.'
ABBA ABBA, Burgess's novel about Keats, is out on 18 February 2018 as part of The Irwell Edition of the Works of Anthony Burgess.
For more information, visit Manchester University Press here: manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526138033
Anthony Burgess reads 'When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be' by John Keats. He recounts the experience of reading the poem while sitting on the Spanish Steps in Rome in You've Had Your Time: 'Reciting the odes, I became aware of a kind of astral wind, a malevolent chill, of a soul chained to the place where the body died, of a silent malignant laughter that mocked not my reading but the poems themselves [...] I recited the last sonnet on the steps outside the Keats house. It was high summer, and the sky was cloudless, but within the space of fourteen lines of iambic pentameters a storm arose, the rain teemed, I and the television team were drenched, and the final couplet was drowned by thunder.'
ABBA ABBA, Burgess's novel about Keats, is out on 18 February 2018 as part of The Irwell Edition of the Works of Anthony Burgess.
For more information, visit Manchester University Press here: manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526138033
