If we were inclined to wonder if anything more needed to be said, it is worth reminding ourselves that the ‘volume of beautiful poetry’ mentioned in the Liverpool Mercury contained ‘Isabella’,‘TheEve of St Agnes’, ‘Lamia’, and Hyperion, along with the Odes variously on or to a Nightingale, Melancholy, Psyche, a Grecian Urn, and Autumn – ‘one of very few “landmark” volumes in the English poetic tradition’, as Roe rightly remarks. And that is not the half of it. Keats is also the author of a collection of letters that remains to this day the most compelling record in English of the struggle to make sense of life, as well as of sense itself.

If, as Hobbes felt, human life is ‘nasty, brutish, and short’, Keats’s was at times nastier and certainly shorter than most. Again and again he was forced to recognise that he had ‘never known any unalloy’d Happiness for many days together’. When he was eight, his father, Thomas Keates, died in a freak horse-riding accident, which Roe refers to the coroner’s court of history: was it a mugging, perhaps, or murder? Was the culprit William Rawlings, his mother’s lover and, before the ‘funeral baked meats’ were cold, the children’s stepfather? His father’s death was followed six years later by that of his impulsive, probably alcoholic mother, Frances, who, when Thomas died, abandoned the children to their grandparents and only came home to die of consumption. The generic ‘youth’ that ‘grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies’ in the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is generally assumed to derive from Keats’s beloved brother, Tom, whom the poet nursed through a final consumptive ordeal not long before discovering his own affliction.

A watercolour miniature of Fanny Brawne, by an unknown artist

It should come as no surprise, then, to discover, with the poet himself, ‘a horrible Morbidity of Temperament which has shown itself at intervals’, or that Keats’s behaviour at school – ‘by turns fiercely pugnacious, rigidly studious, tremblingly sensitive, overwhelmed by grief’ – suggests that he was ‘always in extremes’. The reader coming to the book from Jane Campion’s moving impressionist film Bright Star will not be familiar with all these Keatses. Like other Keats biographers, Roe is keen to complicate the aesthete and poet of feeling with the ‘streetwise creature’, emotionally volatile, quick to take offence, sexually adventurous (and occasionally diseased), sexually anguished, and, for the last four years of his life, habituated to laudanum. None of this makes Keats exceptional for a smart young man of the early nineteenth century, as it happens, but that is the point.

What does make him exceptional are his letters and poetry. As much as any writer before the twentieth century, Keats made poetry out of making poetry – out of the poetry he had read, and out of the question of what and why he should write; out of interpretation: ‘do I wake or sleep?’ The familiar poetic tradition is accordingly well represented in Roe’s account (Dante, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, along with Wordsworth and Keats’s other contemporaries), but so, too, more vividly perhaps than in any previous biography, are the sources of Keats’s poetry that lay closer to hand. ‘Like Wordsworth in “Tintern Abbey” and The Prelude,’ writes Roe, ‘as a poet Keats depended on memories laid down in very early childhood’, only instead of Wordsworth’s haunting, depopulated ‘spots of time’, with their heaven-bearing lakes and scolding mountains, we have the district around Edmonton and Enfield on the outskirts of London, between the City and rural Middlesex: on one side, the country and its fields, waterways, and ephemeral birdsong sounding ‘Past the meadows, over the still stream’, and ‘Up the hill-side’; on the other, the ‘colossal, unavoidable presence’ of the baroque Royal Bethlam Hospital – Bedlam – with Caius Cibber’s gigantic statues, ‘Melancholy Madness’ and ‘Raving Madness’, destined to re-emerge in the monumental agony of the fallen Titans of Hyperion; the Armourers’ Hall on Coleman Street, its walls as busy with helmets and heraldic shields, breastplates and chainmail, pikes, swords, and daggers, as any romance by Edmund Spenser or Walter Scott – preschool for the Romantic Medievalist; and, down Finsbury Pavement to Finsbury Square, James Lackington’s Temple of the Muses, the ‘cavernous bookshop’ into which the entrepreneurial Lackington drove elephants as a promotional stunt.

This was the world of natural and unnatural imagery that, in the fitful, adolescent mind of the poet, blended with stories from Lemprière’s Bibliotheca Classica, Spence’s Polymetis, and Godwin’s The Pantheon, with the incalculably vast, teasing spaces of Bonny-castle’s Introduction to Astronomy and the unlikely lexicon of Kauffman’s Dictionary of Merchandize and Nomenclature in All Languages – unlikely, that is, until we recognise it as a book of words for a rich variety of exotic things, from ‘alabaster’ to ‘vermilion’: ‘page after page disgorged cargoes for realms of gold’, writes Roe.

What Latin Keats knew he taught himself by translating the Aeneid into prose; what classical mythology and culture by reading Lemprière, a shortcut that would be used as a weapon against him in the culture wars he became caught up in through his association with the radical essayist and poet Leigh Hunt. Perhaps because Keats’s name was so frequently and abusively associated with Hunt’s in his own lifetime, critics and biographers have tended to play down the influence of Hunt, as chary of the association as Keats himself became after a while. As author of Fiery Heart: The First Life of Leigh Hunt (2005), Roe is, not surprisingly, alert to ideas and images deriving from that quarter, which makes the revision and restoration of Hunt’s influence on Keats one of the distinguishing features of this biography. Hunt’s poems and essays are used continually as a resource for tracing the origin of the preoccupations and imagery of the Odes and letters. Hunt’s praise of Mrs Siddons’s powers of impersonation, for example, may have prompted the Keatsian notion of ‘Negative Capability’ – ‘when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’ – otherwise attributed to Hazlitt’s lectures on Shakespeare; Hunt’s prison cell, with its rose-trellis wallpaper, books, busts, and lyre, becomes a precursor of the Keatsian bower; Hunt’s conviction that ‘sorrow led to human understanding’ is said to lie behind Keats’s mature vision of life as ‘a vale of Soul-making’ in which heartbreak schools intelligence into spirit; Hunt’s juvenilia can be glimpsed in the ‘Ode to Psyche’, his harvest musings in the Examiner in ‘To Autumn’. There are other candidates for all of these ideas and images, of course, but the reminder that Hunt’s work was always within reach is a salutary one.

I suspect the continuing fascination with Keats betrays a larger cultural anxiety about the technologico-scientific culture we have inherited, challenging as poetry so often is to the claims of materialism, common sense, and logic. ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ and ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ interrogate the human mind’s imagining, the Hyperion poems allegorise change and succession in cultural taste, in the Fall of Hyperion making poetry directly accountable to human suffering, while ‘Lamia’ confronts the cultural dilemma head-on, wrestling with the new empiricism for authority over the rainbow. Keeping faith with the ‘uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts’, Keats’s life and work represent a creative determination to overcome that is frankly inspirational. ‘The Genius of poetry must work out its own salvation in a man,’ he wrote in one his letters, before surging into momentary self-affirmation out of misgivings about having abandoned medicine for poetry: ‘That which is creative must create itself.’