It is somewhat surprising, therefore, that Keats criticism seems in a state of perpetual indecision about how best to understand the relation between real and ideal presence (the actual and the virtual) in his work and life. From its beginnings, critics have oscillated between these poles, praising one at the expense of the other, or bringing one into critical view while leaving the other in the shadows. The pattern was established early: Byron described Keats’s poems as a ‘sort of mental masturbation’ and Keats himself as a ‘tadpole of the lakes’ (‘Some Observations upon an Article’, Blackwood’s Magazine 1820) and as ‘always f–gg–g his Imagination’ (letter to John Murray, 9 September 1820); yet when Byron wrote these words, conservative periodicals were criticising Keats for his radical sympathies. In Victorian England, Matthew Arnold praised Keats’s ‘intellectual and spiritual passion’ for Beauty (introduction to Arnold’s selection of Keats’s poems, 1880), while editors agonised over whether his anxious, impassioned letters to Fanny Brawne should be suppressed. In the twentieth century, Lionel Trilling praised Keats’s ‘mature masculinity’, his ‘direct relationship to the world of external reality’ (‘The Poet as Hero: Keats in His Letters’ in The Opposing Self, 1955); yet Marjorie Levinson argues with equal conviction that Keats produces an ‘aggressively literary’ writing that provides ‘an escape route from an actual life’ (Keats’s Life of Allegory, 1988).

In strong contrast, R.S. White’s John Keats: A Literary Life avoids the ‘either/or’ that structures readings such as these. Influenced no doubt by Keats’s notion of ‘negative capability’, which White defines as ‘impressionability’ and ‘non-judgmental openness’ to difference, he draws the reader along three overlapping narratives. Each narrative is compelling and can be read in its own terms, even as the book weaves them into a polyvocal whole or discordant harmony. It is in this fascinating discordia concors that the chief value of this book lies.

The first narrative is biographical. It tells the well-known but nevertheless still moving story of Keats’s actual life, the chief milestones of which include: the death of his father in 1804, when Keats was eight, and of his mother six years later; his apprenticeship at Guy’s hospital and his decision five years later to become a professional poet, even though he had already obtained his licence to practise as an apothecary; the patronage offered by the radical Leigh Hunt, editor of The Examiner; the wide circle of friends that provided the enabling context for his poetry; the death of his brother Tom; his love for Fanny Brawne; and finally his own death at the age of twenty-six. Drawing on the work of Nicholas Roe among others, White draws a vivid portrait of Keats’s radical sympathies and of his involvement with the Hunt circle, and he adds to previous biographies a significantly new account of Keats’s work as ‘dresser’ (surgeon’s assistant) at Guy’s hospital and of the impact of his medical training on his poetry.

The second narrative is literary. Distinct from and yet complementing the first, it traces the development of Keats’s poetic style, while taking readers inside the poetic worlds he created, which include some of the finest poems in the English language, most notably ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, and the Odes. White deftly maps Keats’s progression from the early poetry, heavily influenced by Spenser and Hunt, to the mature poetry of Isabella and the first Hyperion, ‘focussed respectively on grief and revolutionary political change’; then to the epic ambitions of the second Hyperion; and finally the complex verbal, visual, and thematic patterns of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, and ‘To Autumn’. At the same time, White takes readers inside these diverse poetic worlds: first by an evocation of their literary form, texture, echoes, and resonances; and second through subtle, always insightful, readings of the poems. The latter typically proceed by drawing out a poem’s diverse tendencies and gauging the relation these tendencies hold to each other, in order to conclude by conjuring a sense of its imaginative, emotional, and intellectual architecture. The cumulative effect of these readings is to create a vivid picture of Keats’s oeuvre as a second world, with a complex set of relations to the real.

The third narrative is the literary life. It traces a path between the poles defined by the first and second narratives, the biographical and literary realms, real and ideal presence, and, in so doing, stitches them together. In other words, it reframes Keats’s life as a discontinuous sequence of crises – the question of vocation; the role of the professional poet; Keats’s love for Fanny Brawne, and so on – in which, because he is both actor and patient, the relation between real and ideal presence must be negotiated again and again. The model for this dramatic narrative is arguably drawn from the famous letter in which Keats describes life as a ‘Vale of Soul-making’. We are born as ‘Intelligences’, ‘atoms of perception’, or ‘sparks’, he claims. Our identities must therefore be forged ‘by three grand materials acting the one upon the other’, namely ‘the Intelligence – the human heart ... and the World or Elemental Space’ (letter to George and Georgiana Keats, 14 February–3 May 1819). As White observes, life is here imagined ‘as a work of art, as something which happens in between birth and death, or beginning and end, with no reality before and after itself’, and, we can add, as such brings the disparate threads of the biographical and literary into complex relation with each other.

In its modern form, literary biography is a genre designed to register, in relation to an active and creative subject, the reciprocal influences of real and ideal presence. Seen in this light, not all literary biographies are successful. In some the literary is eclipsed by the material circumstances of the writer’s life. Conversely, the literary can sometimes seem only lightly anchored in the real. In a third group, one which draws on a late-nineteenth-century reading of Romanticism, the literary becomes a simple expression of the life. In pleasurable contrast, White’s John Keats allows us to see Keats as an active/creative agent, forging an identity between the competing demands of the actual and the imagined. This places Keats firmly within his own time, but it also brings his life into fascinating dialogue with the present. The book, a most welcome addition to the literature on John Keats, is certain to draw a wide and appreciative audience.