But most biographers and critics leave it at that. The drama and the triumphs of his great creative year, and the awful pathos of his last year, have understandably dominated their accounts. And he succeeds, sort of. But even though his subject is one of the three or four greatest poets in English, many readers will wonder whether Motion's achievement is worth the effort. It's nice to have a fuller account than usual of the school Keats attended and the hospital he trained at, of his identification with Chatterton and his admiration for Hazlitt.
Motion is very good at filling in the background.
But the foreground doesn't change much. Mostly he is reduced to conjecture, some of it rather strained, about possible echoes in the poems of feelings of loss over the death of his mother or of resentment over his obligations to his brothers. Motion's attempts to demonstrate this will probably strike most readers as too subtle and not significant enough. Keats, and fellow devotees will want to read his biography.