Life of John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics and After-Fame

John Keats lived just twenty-five years, yet he rewrote what poetry could be. This landmark biography, first published in the early twentieth century, traces the arc of that brief, incandescent life: the London apprentice boy who became the greatest lyric poet in the English language. Sidney Colvin drew on personal recollections, unpublished letters, and conversations with Keats's surviving friends to construct an intimate portrait of a man whose passion for beauty was inseparable from his awareness of death. We see the young poet at Enfield and in the dissecting rooms, discovering Shakespeare and Spenser, falling hopelessly in love with Fanny Brawne, and writing his immortal odes in a fever of creation that tuberculosis would soon silence. The biography follows Keats through the brutal critical reception of his lifetime, his desperate flight to Italy, and the agonizing final months in a small room overlooking the Spanish Steps. Colvin's achievement is to make us feel why Keats's friends called him a spirit of fire, and why his poetry still burns.