John Keats was the last of the great romantic poets to be born and the first to die. His brief career is one of the most famous in English literature and Keats himself is the image of genius dying tragically young. In the first full-length biography of Keats for many years, Stephen Coote strips off the varnish of sentiment to reveal him as a man intensely aware of his troubled times; he emerges as a poet for whom beauty was inseparable from personal tragedy, and as one who, setting his face against an authoritarian church and state, tried to find a spiritual life free from the repressive conditions of early nineteenth-century England.