What we have in this superb new biography is neither the exquisite poet of the aesthetes, nor quite the pugnacious radical of Roe’s own earlier work. This new Keats is stranger than both, and it is another of Roe’s Keatsian achievements to have let this strange and contradictory figure come into the light, without on his part any irritable straining after biographical fact and reason. Thanks to Roe’s richly-detailed and often beautifully-written biography, we can now see that Keats, like the minnows of “I stood tip-toe”, was at once resistant and assimilated, and passed his life in a wrestle with sweet delight.