A life of sad romance

‘What porridge had John Keats?’ Browning offers this as the crass sort of question that stupid people ask. But in fact the first person to answer it would have been John Keats himself. He loved to talk about food, good and bad. He writes to his dying brother Tom from Kirkcudbright that ‘we dined yesterday on dirty bacon, dirtier eggs and dirtiest potatoes with a slice of salmon’. As Keats and his Hampstead friend Charles Brown tramped round Loch Fyne, he complained that all they had to live off were eggs, oatcake and whisky:

I lean rather languishingly on a rock, and long for some famous beauty to get down from her Palfrey in passing; approach me with her saddle bags  — and give me a dozen or two capital roast beef sandwiches.

He bathed in the loch, at Cairndow, ‘quite pat and fresh’, until a gadfly bit him. The inn at Cairndow is still there. So is the Burford Bridge Inn under Box Hill where he finished ‘Endymion’. You can still follow the path through Winchester which he describes taking while thinking of the ‘Ode to Autumn’.

No other dead poet is, I think, quite as intensely present to us still, somehow in the flesh. In his review of Keats’s first published volume, Leigh Hunt fastened on the essential thing about him, that he had ‘a strong sense of what really exists and occurs’. In this beguiling new biography, Nicholas Roe, the foremost Keatsian around, seeks to wipe away any lingering image of a sickly moony dreamer and to show us the ‘edgy, streetwise’ livewire who rejoiced in the material world for all of the short time he was in it.

He was only five foot and three-quarters of an inch, but he always filled the room. When he recited poetry — his own or anybody’s — he ‘hoisted himself up and looked burly and dominant’.