John Keats was the last of the great romantic poets to be born and the first to die. His brief career is one of the most famous in English literature and Keats himself is the image of genius dying tragically young. In the first full-length biography of Keats for many years, Stephen Coote strips off the varnish of sentiment to reveal him as a man intensely aware of his troubled times; he emerges as a poet for whom beauty was inseparable from personal tragedy, and as one who, setting his face against an authoritarian church and state, tried to find a spiritual life free from the repressive conditions of early nineteenth-century England. This made Keats dangerous. As Stephen Coote vividly and incisively traces his development from a modest background and on through his training as a surgeon and his first introductions to the literary world, so he shows why Keats was viciously attacked for his humble origins, his liberal politics and his eroticism. Here is a development that takes us to the great odes at the end of Keats’ career, his final descent into consumption and his passionate, unrequited love for Fanny Brawne which he believed brought about his death. As well as Keats’ letters and poems, Stephen Coote uses a wide range of contemporary sources to give us the fullest and most interesting portrait of a poet closely involved in the life around him. Above all, he gives us back a Keats of real vitality – a man profoundly original, challenging and deeply human.
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