‘Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph’
By Lucasta Miller
Knopf, 370 pages

This is a biography by someone from Keats’s neighborhood. Lucasta Miller grew up in Hampstead, where Keats lived and met his beloved Fanny Brawne. Ms. Miller describes the area — what is almost the same and what has changed. The result is a bifurcation of biography branching out into what generations of biographers have made of the poet and what Ms. Miller now thinks is important.

Chronology can be the bane of biography, collaring the writer to the then and then and then of events. Ms. Miller seeks to circumvent this by circling around Keats’s greatest poems — especially his odes — and drawing on his biography, especially via his revelatory letters, in order to tell us the story of his greatest poems.

So the biographer’s account of those provocative last lines of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” — “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” — are interpreted both in terms of the poem itself and what Keats said about truth and beauty in his letters. You’ll be disappointed, though, if you think Ms. Miller will supply the definitive interpretation.  

Call this an unromantic biography of a Romantic poet. Ms. Miller exposes how clueless Keats was about women, which explains some of his cruel letters to Brawne. When the letters were first published in the 1870s, Matthew Arnold and others were aghast at how informal and randy they could be — though if you read the poems closely, as Ms. Miller does, Keats’s sexuality surfaces.

If you have an impression of an ethereal poet, scrub that from your consciousness. Keats trained as a doctor and surgeon (at least once he removed a bullet). Ms. Miller portrays him as a capable and hardy man. His succumbing to consumption, as tuberculosis was called then, had nothing to do with a robust constitution that failed him only in his last year.  

Keats was something of a lowborn radical — at least, that is how he was viewed by contemporaries, including Wordsworth, who was turning conservative by the time Keats came on the scene. Coleridge met Keats on Hampstead Heath and was cordial enough, but Keats seems to have been somewhat disconcerted by Coleridge’s lightning changes of subject.

The effect of such chance meetings might be called near misses, as Keats made his way into a literary world that could be quite savage. Ms. Miller joins other biographers, however, in scoffing at the idea that bad reviews broke the poet’s heart or that the negativity of literary society had anything to do with the poet’s death.

Nonetheless, the biographer depicts Keats’s harrowing last year, coughing up blood and sorrowing that he had not made more of an impact as a poet. He agonized over his separation from Brawne as he tried to recover his health in Rome, thought to be a therapeutic destination. 

Ms. Miller meditates on Keats’s epitaph, “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water,” explaining why it is difficult to say exactly what he meant and how his friends reacted to his last words. She concludes that “the inscription fails to do justice to those who had in fact fully appreciated Keats’s genius in his lifetime.”

The treatment of Brawne is one of the highlights of this biography.  The earliest biographers kept her under wraps, fearing Keats’s intimate letters to her bespoke an improper sexual liaison. Brawne herself was guarded in what she had to say about the poet, which in this case the careful Ms. Miller is at pains to suss out.

Did they or didn’t they do it? Hard to say from the evidence, and just as hard to figure out what Ms. Miller’s ultimate take is. The best she can suggest is that the love between Keats and Brawne was visceral. Keats liked to speak of “warming” with women, and we still don’t know, Ms. Miller reports, exactly what that means.

As with an earlier book, “The Brontë Myth,” which explores how biographers re-created the sisters, Ms. Miller identifies key points in the evolution of Keats biography, especially favoring the work of Amy Lowell, Nicholas Roe, and Robert Gittings. The result is a book that both Keats adepts and those who know much less will find engaging and edifying.

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Amy Lowell Anew: A Biography”