Lucasta Miller takes Keats’s best-known poems and excavates their backstories.
In doing so, she reveals a complex individual, not the ethereal figure of his posthumous myth. The real Keats was a lower-middle-class outsider from a tragic and dysfunctional family, whose extraordinary energy and love of language allowed him to work his way into the heart of English literature; a freethinker and a liberal at a time of repression; a man who delighted in the sensation of the moment.