Keats

Few English poets are read as widely or loved as deeply as John Keats, who lived from 1795 to 1821. His short life has also shaped how we imagine the poet's career. Born to a stable keeper, he lost both parents while still a boy. He studied medicine before choosing poetry instead. While caring for his brother through a fatal illness, Keats caught tuberculosis himself and died in Rome at twenty-five. Those who write about him often describe a passionate, generous, and noble man whose fate has a tragic weight.

Andrew Motion, a poet himself, tells this story with a vivid, sharp-eyed narrative. The book treats Keats as one of the representative lives in English literature and is the first fresh study of him in a generation. Motion differs from earlier biographers by examining the social and political world in which Keats grew up. He also weaves the events of Keats's life together with the poems, drawing closely on Keats's letters.