Keats initially trained as a doctor and long believed in poetry's healing capacities, an aspect the book emphasises. I have tried to write poems that address the big emotions of life. Salt Water, his 1997 volume, tackles just such universal themes as it explores both the destructive and redemptive qualities of water. My father was a brewer like his brother and his grandfather before him. There were books at home but no-one read them.
Motion believes the impulse to become a poet springs from an intuitive source.
In some measure, being a poet is something that's given to you. It's a primitive, visceral, purely emotional thing with me. This is why Keats' idea of diligent indolence is so valuable- creative downtime when your intellect isn't working. One biography was written from firsthand experience, the other a complete exercise of the imagination. By knowing somebody you can believe that the version of the person you know is an adequate account of the individual and is isn't.