K E A T S

John Keats, who died at the age of twenty-five, had perhaps the most remarkable career of any English poet.

Regarded by many as one of the very greatest of the Romantic poets, John Keats was also among the most intriguing figures of his age.

A sensualist who composed erotic and playful love poetry, it seemed to his admirers that Keats had changed the literary universe.

His poetry was highly distinctive, adopting a multitude of rhythms, images, forms, and personae, his greatness stemming from the subtleties and ambivalences of tone and texture contributing to his remarkable sense that the career of the artist was an exploration of art's power to bring solace and meaning to human suffering.

From the joy and strife of poems such as Sleep and Poetry and Lamia, to the intimate and intense Endymion, Keats breathed new vigor into poetry by drawing lucid and often startling metaphors from the world in which he lived.

This new 21st century digital edition of Sir Sidney Colvin’s classic biography of Keats provides many valuable insights into Keats's poetic genius.

The Keats literature is already large, but Colvin was correct in saying that "there does not yet exist any one book giving a full and connected account of his life and poetry together in the light of our present knowledge and with help of all the available material."

In his definitive biography, Sir Sidney shows us Keats as connected to his contemporaries, and his forerunners, with full-length portraits of his friends, and critics.

JOHN KEATS (1795-1821) Over the course of his short life, John Keats honed a raw talent into a brilliant poetic maturity. By the end of his brief career, he had written poems of such beauty, imagination and generosity of spirit, that he had—perhaps unwittingly—fulfilled his wish that he should ‘be among the pantheon of English poets after my death’.

His poems remain among the most profound, and beautiful in the English language.