I watched Bright Star last night and I was reminded of the Keats class that I took years ago.  My professor was Tom Clark and he could talk about John Keats for three hours straight with no notes, just total recall.  He spent hours in the Berkeley Library week after week, year after year, perfecting his Keats presentation.  I'd taught Keats in high school, "The Eve of St. Agnes," usually and it was always fun because of the ritual involved in the poem.  However, to be a graduate student and to see Keats through the eyes of a true scholar was a real pleasure.  We had to keep a Keats notebook in which we wrote our responses to the stacks and stacks of poems and letters that we had to read.  When we got them back at the end of the semester, Tom Clark had answered every question in my notebook with thoughtful responses.  The tragedy of Keats: the loss, the illness, and the inability to be with the one he loved, all came back to me last night through his words.  I was happy to be reminded of Keats, of Tom Clark, of my ability to help students understand poetry in a language that seems foreign to them.  The movie is worth seeing, and if you've never read any Keats, you will be inspired to do so.