Select Biographies of Keats
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Bate, Walter Jackson. John Keats. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1963. [Along with Gittings 1968, an important contribution
to our understanding of Keats, as well as supplying important readings of Keats’s
poetry and poetics.]
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Bush, Douglas. John Keats: His Life and Writings. New York: Collier, 1966.
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Coote, Stephen. John Keats, A Life. London: Hodder, 1995.
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Colvin, Sidney. John Keats: His Life and Poetry; His Friends, Critics, and After-Fame. London: Macmillan, 1917.
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Crutcher, Lawrence M. The Keats Family. Louisville, KY: Butler Books, 2009.
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Everest, Kelvin. John Keats. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: [http://www.oxforddnb.com/public/lotw/1.html]
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Gigante, Denise. The Keats Brothers: The Life of John and George. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard U., 2011. [Works well in placing the lives
of the two brothers side-by-side, as it were.]
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Gittings, Robert. John Keats. London: Heinemann, 1968.
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Lowell, Amy. John Keats (2 vols). London: Jonathan Cape, 1925.
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Milnes, Richard Monckton. Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats. New York: Dutton, 1969. [First published in 1848; did much in attempting to introduce
a more modern and realistic assessment of Keats.]
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Motion, Andrew. Keats. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997. [More sensitive to the poetry than most
biographies of Keats.]
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Plumly, Stanley. Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography. New York: Norton, 2008. [An odd and oddly terrific meditation on Keats, mainly about
Keats’s last years.]
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Stillinger, Jack. The ‘Story’ of Keats. The Cambridge Companion to Keats. Ed. Susan J. Wolfson, 246-260. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001.[A smart, precise introduction
to the life of Keats.]
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Roe, Nicholas. John Keats: A New Life. New Haven: Yale UP, 2013. [Full of contextual detail and interesting speculations.]
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Walker, Carol Kyros. Walking North With Keats. New Haven: Yale UP, 1992. [Contains some good photos that offer some of what Keats
sees on his northern expedition.]
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Ward, Aileen. John Keats: The Making of a Poet. New York: Viking, 1963. [A general psychoanalytical approach, but quite accessible.]
- White, R. S. John Keats: A Literary Life. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
- Woof, Robert, and Stephen Hebron. John Keats. Wordsworth Trust, 1995.
Worth looking at is Charles Cowden Clarke’s Recollections of Keats.
By an Old School Fellow, in the January 1861 edition of The
Atlantic Monthly, since Clarke has some first-hand memories of Keats. And Keats appears
in Leigh Hunt’s Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries (v.2, 1828).
