NONFICTION

John Keats: A New Life

Yale Univ. Nov. 2012. c.384p. illus. bibliog. index. ISBN 9780300124651. $32.50. LIT
COPY ISBN
OrangeReviewStarRoe (English, Univ. of St. Andrews; Fiery Heart: The First Life of Leigh Hunt) presents a new Keats biography to join the 1963 classic by Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats, and the more recent biography, Keats, by Andrew Motion. While many biographies of the great English Romantic poet create separation between his life and his poetry, Roe shows them to be integral parts of a whole. By applying extensive new archival research to show the connections between Keats's ambitions, frustrations, and his poetry, Roe presents a more passionate and even rowdy Keats. The strength of this biography is the close attention paid to the details of Keats's life which help us to read and interpret his poetry. We are a long way from the image of Yeats's schoolboy, face pressed against the windowpane of life.
VERDICT Eminently readable, and thorough without being verbose, Roe's book may legitimately claim to be the new definitive biography of Keats.
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