John Keats

Summary

Walter Jackson Bate traces the short life of the English Romantic poet John Keats, following him from a difficult youth and medical training through the astonishing burst of poetry he produced before dying of tuberculosis at twenty five. The book reads Keats closely as both a man and a maker of verse, weaving the letters and the great odes into a portrait of a mind growing toward maturity at extraordinary speed. It stands as a landmark of literary biography for its sympathy and its careful attention to how the poems came to be.