John Keats: A New Life
Keats has been overburdened by the recent biographies of Stephen Coote (1995), Andrew Motion (1997), Stanley Plumly (2008), R. S. White (2010), and Denise Gigante (2011). Desperately striving for originality, Roe states, “This book begins with a new account of his family and earliest childhood and finds in London’s inner city and shape-shifting edges the beginnings of his life as a poet.” He also, unconvincingly, describes the tiny Keats as “a smart, streetwise creature—restless, pugnacious, sexually adventurous.” But Roe’s excessively detailed week-by-week account is academic and dull, with scores of dubious speculations. His commonplace comments on the poems do not explain Keats’ astonishing progress after turning out a mass of mediocre verse, nor do they significantly illuminate the suddenly great poetry of his “miraculous year.” Roe repeats the familiar story of Keats’ tormented love for the shallow and self-absorbed Fanny Brawne and his inexorable destruction by the tuberculosis that led to his premature feeling of “the cold earth upon” him before his tragic death in Rome at the age of 25. Large public libraries that need every Keats biography should order this one, but others can skip it. --Jeffrey Meyers