NICHOLAS ROE, John Keats: A New Life.

Abstract

WHEN I heard that Nichols Roe was contemplating a biography of Keats, I have to admit I was a bit surprised. Not that I had any doubts about his qualifications for this project. His John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (1998) had established Roe as one of our leading Keats scholars, and one who had new things to say about the ways in which, say, Keats’s education or his medical training influenced his poetry. Roe had also written the best biography we have of Keats’s friend, Leigh Hunt, in Fiery Heart: The First Life of Leigh Hunt (2005). Roe had the scholarly and writerly credentials to take on this job. Still, it was hard for me to imagine we needed another biography of Keats. After all, Keats has been extremely well served by his biographers, from Hunt himself writing about Keats in Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries to the trio of great Keats biographies in the 1960s by Walter Jackson Bate, Aileen Ward, and Robert Gittings, to Andrew Motion’s massive biography of (1999). What did we have to learn about Keats’s life that had not already been explored?