This captures admirably both the closeness to, and the distance from, the political in Keats’s poetry.

If the insights of Roe’s biography are fresh, sometimes vividly so, these vivacities have not been purchased by any modish freedom with the form of the book. Biographical fashion for the time being has turned its face against what Roe calls “cradle-to-grave” or “womb-to-tomb” biographies. The new biographers attempt to tell the story of a life through narratives “that begin at the end, or in which the subject is viewed through lesser-known siblings, imaginary friends, or personal effects”. Roe eschews such cute tricks. His own method is meticulously chronological and sequential. Had Keats lived a normal span, this might have become tedious. As it is, with Keats dying aged 25, it is a method which allows Roe to focus with a truly Keatsian intensity on such details of the life as have survived.

This may not be the biography of Keats that gives the reader the clearest sense of the broad outlines of the poet’s life. Sometimes Roe’s immersion in the flood of detail makes his narrative confusing to follow, and those not already familiar with the Keatsian dramatis personae will sometimes struggle to recall who is meant by “Tom” or “Severn” or “Dilke”—names which come more than naturally to Roe in his unrivalled familiarity with Keats and his world, but which the rest of us may need laboriously to remember. Nevertheless, this is, by far, the biography which will most delight those who are already familiar with that outline. It loads each rift with the ore of biographical detail (often marvellously retrieved), and threads the whole story of Keats’s life with intriguing and imaginative speculations.

It is Roe’s achievement to have written the most Keatsian biography of Keats that we will ever have. And he has done this by taking seriously Keats’s own idea that the life of a writer may be discerned figuratively in their works. The result is to bring Roe surprisingly close to those critics who have championed the aesthetic Keats, at least in terms of their shared reverence for Keats’s words. No critic was more committed to an aesthetic Keats than John Jones, and Jones famously justified the intense concentration he brought to Keats’s language by blandly confessing: “every section-heading of this book [John Keats’s Dream of Truth] is a phrase from three consecutive sentences of a single letter he wrote: as if I thought his words, even in casual prose, might sometimes be enchanted. And in fact that is what I do think.” Roe’s Keats is very different from Jones’s. Nevertheless, Roe too seems to believe that Keats’s words may sometimes be almost supernaturally significant.