John Keats: A Literary Life

Literary Lives Founding Editor: Richard Dutton, Professor of English, Lancaster University

This series offers stimulating accounts of the literary careers of the most admired and influential English-language authors. Volumes follow the outline of writers' working lives, not in the spirit of traditional biography, but aiming to trace the professional, publishing, and social contexts which shaped their writing.

`A great strength of this impressive biography is the way it accompanies Keats's life narrative with critical and interpretative passages on the poetry - there is much in these pages that will provoke thought for students and more experienced Keatsians. Keats's childhood, school years and medical career are exceptionally well done, and among many highlights the account of Keats's plays, letters, and Endymion are especially rewarding.'--- Professor Nicholas Roe, University of St. Andrews, UK

With scholarly elegance, this latest biography of Keats finds fresh links between the poet's work and his life. His five years as a medical student are considered in the formation of his thought, as are his political radicalism and philosophical ideas of life as a `vale of soul-making' and of the `three chambers' of the creative imagination. Keats is seen as more heavily indebted to Renaissance writers than his contemporaries. R. S. White tactfully probes Keats's emotional entanglements with Fanny Brawne and other women, and the shifting relationships within his literary coterie. The much loved Odes, The Eve of St Agnes and narrative poems are considered alongside his playwrighting ventures and many other rich poems that are not so well known.

This powerful book will excite students, scholars and all readers who love Keats's poetry and are drawn to the moving story of his brief life.

R. S. White has taught at the University of Newcastle on Tyne and is now Australian Professorial Fellow and Winthrop Professor of English and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia. He has published books on Shakespeare, Keats and Hazlitt. Natural Law in English Renaissance Literature (1996) was followed by Natural Rights in Romanticism of the 1790s (Palgrave Macmillan 2005) and Pacifism and English Literature: Minstrels of Peace (Palgrave Macmillan 2008).