This landmark biography of celebrated Romantic poet John Keats explodes entrenched conceptions of him as a delicate, overly sensitive, tragic figure. Instead, Nicholas Roe reveals the real flesh-and-blood poet: a passionate man driven by ambition but prey to doubt, suspicion, and jealousy; sure of his vocation while bitterly resentful of the obstacles that blighted his career; devoured by sexual desire and frustration; and in thrall to alcohol and opium. Through unparalleled original research, Roe arrives at a fascinating reassessment of Keats's entire life, from his early years at Keats's Livery Stables through his harrowing battle with tuberculosis and death at age 25. Zeroing in on crucial turning points, Roe finds in the locations of Keats's poems new keys to the nature of his imaginative quest.Roe is the first biographer to provide a full and fresh account of Keats's childhood in the City of London and how it shaped the would-be poet. The mysterious early death of Keats' Keats has been overburdened by the recent biographies of Stephen Coote (1995), Andrew Motion (1997), Stanley Plumly (2008), R. S. White (2010), and Denise Gigante (2011). Desperately striving for originality, Roe states, “This book begins with a new account of his family and earliest childhood and finds in London’s inner city and shape-shifting edges the beginnings of his life as a poet.” He also, unconvincingly, describes the tiny Keats as “a smart, streetwise creature—restless, pugnacious, sexually adventurous.” But Roe’s excessively detailed week-by-week account is academic and dull, with scores of dubious speculations. His commonplace comments on the poems do not explain Keats’ astonishing progress after turning out a mass of mediocre verse, nor do they significantly illuminate the suddenly great poetry of his “miraculous year.” Roe repeats the familiar story of Keats’ tormented love for the shallow and self-absorbed Fanny Brawne and his inexorable destruction by the tuberculosis that led to his premature feeling of “the cold earth upon” him before his tragic death in Rome at the age of 25. Large public libraries that need every Keats biography should order this one, but others can skip it. --Jeffrey Meyers "A wonderful work that has many new things to say about Keats, his extraordinary work and inner life. A finer biography is unlikely to emerge this year."—Ian Thomson, Financial Times (Ian Thomson Financial Times 2012-09-22) “Roe’s is a remarkable achievement, authoritative and imaginative to a degree that should make all future Keats biographers quail.”—–John Carey, Sunday Times (John Carey Sunday Times ) “This absorbing, diligently researched biography draws us into the North London homes of Keats’s circle, imagining even the warmth of the fireplace as the poets challenged each other to sonnet-writing competitions.”— New Yorker   ( New Yorker ) 'An astonishingly  fresh and observant new biography, with a magical sense of shifting moods and places. Meticulously researched and precisely visualised, it produces a kind of hypnotic video portrait of Keats, day-by-day and sometimes hour-by-hour. The fine evocation of the poet’s disturbed City childhood is brilliantly fed back into the complex imagery of the later poetry. Above all perhaps, Roe’s deep knowledge of Keats’s wide and raffish circle of London friends – Hunt, Haydon, Brown, Hazlitt, Lamb, Reynolds, Severn and all the others – makes us see the poet from multiple angles, in all his fierce contradictions, so sympathetic and so strangely modern.' - Richard Holmes, author of The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (Richard Holmes) "This new book promises to become the definitive biography of one of the major Romantic poets. For decades to come, readers and scholars of Keats will rely on the wealth of detail that Roe has uncovered and recorded."—Andrew Bennett, author of Keats, Narrative and Audience: The Posthumous Life of Writing (Andrew Bennett) "This new book promises to become the definitive biography of one of the major Romantic poets. Keats has of course been well served by biographers, but what Roe adds to these Lives is his own superbly detailed, finely discriminating understanding of and research into the events of Keats's life, of individuals in his family and wider circle, and of the larger historical contexts in which the poet lived and wrote. The result is a book that supplements in countless minor details what is already known about the poet. For decades to come, readers and scholars of Keats will rely on the wealth of detail that Roe has uncovered and recorded."—Andrew Bennett, author of Keats, Narrative and Audience: The Posthumous Life of Writing (Andrew Bennett) “A tightly focused and highly useful biography . . . [that] acutely displays the intensity, anguish and triumph of a great life.”— Kirkus Reviews  (starred review) ( Kirkus ) “[A] sumptuously written biography . . . Roe sees complex