Nicholas Roe has always wished to challenge this aestheticised Keats. His first book, John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (1997), attempted straightforwardly to overturn it by means of a full-frontal assault. In that book Roe set out to “restore the vivacious, even pugnacious, voices of Keats’s poetry” by showing how time and time again the poems “responded to and addressed matters of the moment” in a way which would have been evident to their first readers, but which a later academic audience found it hard to catch.
This was an attempt to turn Keats into Shelley, and unsurprisingly, despite the quality of the research which went into it, it did not entirely persuade. The argument was pushed with a certain bluntness. The fact of there being echoes and points of connection between Keats’s poetry and radical journals of the day was too easily taken as evidence that the poems themselves must also have been radical. However, Roe’s stance towards Keats succeeds much better in the mode of this excellent and fascinating new biography, where his image of the poet emerges more easily and more naturally from the flow of event, and is often brilliantly illuminated by the light thrown by circumstance.
Roe’s Keats is primarily a Londoner, and the first chapters of the book are an impres- sive recovery of the milieu in which the young Keats was raised. He is also—at least until disease undermines his constitution, and despite his short stature—vigorously physical, given to rough-housing when a boy, fond of demanding walking holidays when a man. He was raised and educated in radical circles: the dissenting culture of Enfield School is brought out very well by Roe. Nor was Keats without financial means. There was a modest amount of money in the Keats family, although access to it was hampered by its being tied up in Chancery. Nevertheless, Keats was able to draw on money, and even to lend it to friends more indigent than he. Roe explores the complicated money affairs of the Keats family in impressive detail. Finally, Roe’s Keats was not so attached to the ideal of beauty that he would overlook or ignore its earthly embodiments (indeed, the folly of so doing is a central part of the meaning of Endymion). Roe underlines the avidity of the young Keats for sexual experience, a trait perhaps traceable to his mother, who was much given to “pleasure”; and he plausibly suggests that in consequence Keats contracted a venereal disease for which he treated himself with mercury.
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