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Sense and sensibility

John Keats: A Life by Stephen Coote, Hodder, $306 THE dying poet penning immortal lyrics on the incomparable beauty of the Greek myths while himself coughing up cupfuls of blood. The former medical student writing letters to friends that display a deep humanity while barely being able to find the money for the postage. The Keats legend has contributed powerfully to the Romantic tradition of the artist as a genius struggling against a hostile, uncomprehending world.

From not long after his death in 1821, John Keats was widely perceived as the quintessential English poet, possessing the power of imagination and the ability to 'think through his senses' granted to writers such as Shakespeare and few others, and a mature self-knowledge that belied his years. Only his premature death at 26 prevented him equalling the greatest in achievement.

The critical current these days, however, is swinging strongly away from ideas of 'genius'. Instead there's increasing interest in seeing writers as the products of the social and economic conditions of their times. This excellent new biography of Keats gives due weight to such concerns while in no way denying his fascinating talent, as well as his exceptional qualities as a man.

Born into the poorer end of the emerging middle class, Keats on leaving school became part of a London circle of radical journalists and voteless professional men. The establishment Tory press consequently associated him and his sensuous, quasi-erotic verse with a low-class threat to the ruling elite's public values of decorum and Christian restraint.

In a period of intense repression of anything that could be interpreted as recalling the tradition of the French Revolution, Keats' open rejection of Christianity, and his invocation of the Greek gods in the name of sensual pleasure, spelt political danger. The Tory press decided he had to be ruthlessly derided as a simpleton who should go back to his medical studies (in those days medicine was seen by the upper classes as a decidedly disreputable pursuit).

The Oxbridge-educated elite had long claimed the Greek and Latin classics as their own private territory, making out that such works reinforced ideas of political and sexual moderation, and rule by a select few. Upstarts such as Keats could only read these classics in translation - in books like Chapman's translation of Homer. To boast of such shortcomings in a sonnet, as Keats had done, was to combine ignorance with the whiff of a dangerous radicalism.

Truth and beauty, twin values Keats celebrates in another poem, spelt out to many at the time a secret code, representing anti-Christianity and the unbridled pursuit of sex respectively.

It's arguable that an open love of beauty has been seen as subversive in England ever since the Reformation. The authorities in England still commission ugly architecture whenever they can, and abandonment to loveliness is considered effeminate.

In this context, it's relevant that the Wilde set took Keats as their high priest. For them the religion of beauty, which they considered Keats had founded, was virtually synonymous with homosexuality. They too appealed to the ancient Greeks for support, and once again, as with Keats 80 years before, the authorities saw their bid for erotic liberation as a form of sedition. The whole pattern repeated itself again in the 1960s.

In fact the aristocracy in Keats' day, from the royal family downwards, freely tolerated wild debauchery in their own ranks. By contrast, poor Keats almost certainly never experienced physical love with anyone.

Byron, a debauchee of talent, with aristocratic assumptions but rebellious impulses, began by joining in his class' mockery of Keats. But later, falling out with his former allies Byron heaped praise on him, comparing Hyperion to the tragedies of Aeschylus.

Keats spent much of his short adulthood in frustrated love with the girl living next door. As a trained medical man, he had every reason to believe the orthodoxy of the time that unexpressed love could turn in on its host and kill him. He felt his love was like an illness, and it was indeed to prove fatal.

But it was tuberculosis that actually killed him, and at every stage of the terrible disease he knew precisely what was to come next, and what painful and futile treatments he would be forced to endure.

Keats stands right at the centre of the English poetic tradition, not marred by eccentricity, special pleading, or an excessive concern for the ephemeral issues of the day. Beauty, nature, art, classical mythology and the transience of all things were his subjects, and these place him at the heart of the most enduring of all poetic traditions.

Stephen Coote is a professional writer on literary subjects and has written books on Byron, William Morris and Sir Walter Raleigh. He's not an academic; but these days he is probably all the better scholar for that, and this is both a vivid and thorough biography.

He has spliced into the conventional facts of Keats' life research into such subjects as the way tuberculosis develops and eventually kills its victims, newly-discovered details of Keats' financial affairs, his walking tour to Scotland in 1818, and - most importantly - the political and social background against which he wrote.

The other Romantic poets recognised the young Keats as their peer. The intellectual Shelley, a minor aristocrat by birth but a fierce, well-read radical, offered him hospitality in Italy when everyone was urging the dying poet to go south. The older Wordsworth, however, was a different matter.

The well-worn tales of their encounters are all here: the now Christian Wordsworth commenting: 'A very pretty piece of paganism!' after Keats had recited one of his poems; Mrs Wordsworth's reproof that 'Mr Wordsworth is never interrupted!' during a light-hearted attempt to start an argument; and Keats leaving a note behind the clock on finding Wordsworth not at home when he looked him up during his northern walking tour.

There's no doubt about Keats' natural talent, which surprised even him. The lawyer Woodhouse, a close friend of the poet's, once recalled how Keats would jot down a phrase, and only afterwards be struck with astonishment at its beauty, marvelling aloud at how he could possibly have come to write it.

Although aimed at a popular readership, this biography can take its place beside the classic accounts of Keats by Bate and Gittings. In highlighting the political background without questioning that Keats was a poet more concerned with beauty than with politics, it performs a balancing act that is especially valuable in an age when academic rakes are desperately ripping apart classic literary texts in a manic effort to recruit them as support for drearily predictable sociological causes.

How Keats would have laughed, and then spat blood into the gutter in derision.

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