Who would have thought that Keats's slender life, which always hung by a thread and was snuffed out altogether after just twenty-five years, would weigh in at over six hundred pages? But this is, in many ways, an eye-opening read. The poet Andrew Motion, clearly a fervent admirer of Keats the poet, illuminates individual poems with shafts of voluptuous, intelligent light; as a biographer, however, Motion won't settle for the super-sensitive wilting violet Keats of romantic tradition, presenting instead a persuasive portrait of a clear-headed radical, a man who tangled with what he himself called his "barbarous age"; in short, a revolutionary.
By Arminta Wallace