A Brighter Word Than Bright Dan Beachy-Quick University of Iowa Press, 2013 — In a rejected preface to his long poem Endymion, John Keats—apparently not having internalized the workshop admonition “no disclaimers”—writes: “. . . this Poem must rather be considerd as an endeavour than a thing accomplish’d; a poor prologue to what, if I live, I humbly hope to do.” But Endymion, however inadequate in its author’s mind, was not an exercise without reward. The criticism that the young poet faced, both internal and external, became a transformative experience. As biographer W. Jackson Bate explains: Another reaction was his strong dislike [after Endymion] of forcing himself to write for the mere sake of writing. . . .  For the same reason he was henceforth to feel freer, if a longer poem was not developing the way he hoped, to leave it unfinished and turn to something else; and his eagerness to publish subsided until, by contrast, it almost approached indifference. In A Brighter Word Than Bright (University of Iowa Press, 2013), Dan Beachy-Quick undertakes …