KEATS.<i> By Andrew Motion</i> .<i> Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 636 pp., $35</i>

Keats became immortal, and then he died. That’s not to say he grew famous during his lifetime. He was, in fact, famously neglected by the critics of his day, when he was not being mauled by them. But he spent his 25 years on Earth communing so directly with eternity that when his end finally came, he fell right into the arms of posterity.

Even if temperament hadn’t, circumstances would have given Keats an aptitude for expressing first and last things the same way that some people are born athletes, musicians or craftsmen. He lost his father when he was 8, his mother six years later and his beloved brother Tom eight years after that. Both Keats’ mother and his brother died of consumption, and Keats himself fatally contracted the disease on a walking tour through England’s Lake Country and Scotland when he was about 23.

Poverty dogged him. His father, working as a young man as a hostler at a livery stable and inn called The Swan and Hoop, married the establishment’s daughter and inherited the business. Though he left a substantial amount of money to his wife when he died, she remarried badly, soon separating from her second husband, who by law took control of her estate, along with The Swan and Hoop, and gave nothing to his stepchildren.

Although Keats’ grandfather left considerable bequests in trust for John and his two brothers and sister, the money stayed locked up for years in Dickensian proceedings. Worst of all, the guardian, whom Keats’ grandmother appointed to administer her husband’s estate, was at best a stingy, sanctimonious Philistine and at worst an outright thief. It’s not hard to understand why Keats first chose the security of a medical career, becoming an apothecary, not quite a doctor but one who frequently fulfilled a doctor’s function with the poor. Yet Keats’ decision to abruptly leave his internship, along with an almost profligate generosity to his friends, ensured a life of impoverishment for him. He lacked the money to marry the young woman he fell in love with, Fanny Brawne--he also quickly discovered there was no point in marrying her since he was dying--and expired penniless in 1821 in Rome in the arms of his dear friend, Joseph Severn. Keats was rich in friends.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (he met Keats only once and later said he knew immediately that Keats was dying) wrote that Keats had long tried to reconcile his personality with infinity. Various English romantics took on that task in different ways: Wordsworth dramatized his past, Byron enacted himself, Shelley decked himself out in ideas and set them marching in images (that sometimes broke under the strain).

To extremes born, Keats had to reconcile his oblivion-haunted personality with everyday life. Words, as someone once said, are a poor boy’s arsenal, and Keats hungered for words that simultaneously might bind him to the world and bind the shifting, prismatic world to a larger unifying reality. More than any of his contemporaries, Keats could achieve the Shakespearean fulfillment that occurs when language marries the particular and the universal:

Wherein lies happiness? In that which becks

Our ready minds to fellowship divine,

A fellowship with essence; till we shine,

Full alchemiz’d, and free of space. Behold

The clear religion of heaven! Fold

A rose leaf around thy finger’s taperness,

And soothe thy lips . . .

[from “Endymion”]

“A fellowship with essence”--note the wedding of the almost common word “fellowship” with the high-born metaphysics of “essence.” “Taperness” skirts the edge of awkwardness and comes as a sensuous revelation. The invitation to the reader to put a rose leaf to his lips is an invitation to fellowship, an alchemizing-in-reverse of essence into a worldly thing: These images are a palpable, inductive leap back to the general propositions at the poem’s beginning. At Keats’ best, he could keep the particular hard, specific and concrete while it accrued universal meaning. It was as if he could join the abstract mystery of death that he experienced as a child to the ocular proof of fragile materiality that he witnessed as a medical student.

In his day, however, Keats drew criticism that he was a mincing poetaster with flashes of true sonority. His first volume of poetry was vilified by critics, and they kept after him. As other biographers, and now Andrew Motion in this generous and beautifully written new life, point out, Keats’ Tory detractors were mostly reacting against his liberal politics and alliances. After Keats’ death, Byron and Shelley, in fact, popularized the fantastically romantic notion that Keats’ reviewers had actually killed him (though this is not impossible in England). Writing about Keats’ death, Byron sneered: “ ‘Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle / Should let itself be snuffed out by an article.” Yet it was true, as Motion also acknowledges, that Keats’ early poetry was often marred by the lush opacities that he adopted from his mentor and patron, the liberal poet and magazine publisher Leigh Hunt.

Though he is acutely sensitive to Keats’ inner life, Motion has little new to say about him or his poetry, so he frames his biography with the social and political context of Keats’ life. That is both the weakest aspect of his book and one of the strongest. It is strong in the sense of historical evocation, which Motion does vividly well. Keats lived through an age of savage class division in the maw of England’s Industrial Revolution, a time of violent repression of disenfranchised workers, of radical politics and of great intellectual ferment. Indeed, his most vicious reviewers hammered like blacksmiths at Keats’ humble origins, sounding something like Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster sniping at James Joyce’s lowly beginnings nearly a century later: “It is a better and a wiser thing,” remarked one of Keats’ critics, “to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the sop, Mr. John.”

Unfortunately, Motion also feels he has to reduce Keats’ poetry to the very social and political circumstances the poetry toughs its way beyond. For Keats was indeed tough, not a crocus but a resilient little geranium (he stood barely above 5 feet tall). Motion reads Keats so coarsely that it’s hard to believe that, a fine and accomplished poet himself, Motion takes his own analyses seriously. In “To Autumn,” Keats writes:

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing son,

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the

thatch-eves run . . .

Death winds like the vine around the stalk in Keats. So autumn “conspiring” with the sun carries a hint of menace and betrayal. It is a season, of course, whose gorgeousness cuts life down. But for Motion and other critics of a similar bent, “conspiring” refers to radical plots afoot against the government. And the bees, who in the same poem “think warm days will never cease / For summer has o’er brimmed their clammy cells” get identified as England’s afflicted and oppressed workers.

Yet with their “clammy cells,” the bees could just as well be industrious and hopeful as Keats himself--and therefore every mortal human being--fearing, with his clammy, consumptive hands, that he will cease along with the warm days. After all, one of his greatest sonnets fretfully begins “When I have fears that I may cease to be / Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain.” Along with “cease,” “gleaner” appears in “To Autumn”: Poets do not stay with certain words by accident. It’s hard to believe that Keats wrote “To Autumn” with a political pamphlet, rather than with his own universally particular fate, before his eyes. Forcing such crude interpretations, Motion trades his poetic birthright for a potted message.

Luckily, Motion’s eloquent and deeply insightful telling of Keats’ life takes up the majority of his biography. His theme is Keats’ ethical beauty, the problem that he set himself in his poetry: how to live a true and good existence without leaving the currents of the world. For if Keats was “half in love with easeful death” and its Platonic embrace, he was also half in love with taxing life. Thus his poetry travels along two parallel lines, “the starry firmament above and the moral law within,” as Kant--the theoretician of romantic genius, and himself the son of a poor saddler--described divine law and human conscience at about the same time as Keats was living.

Yet whereas for Kant the reasoning and judging mind finally reconciles what is with what morally ought to be, the ideal and the real never converge in Keats’ poetry. At the end of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” come these famous and enigmatic words: “ ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’--that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Yet to know something is not to possess it, much less to have the capacity to act on it. The poem earns its paradoxical conclusion by thrillingly restating its paradoxical development. Its own lines are all that it has to hang on as proof of its vision. Keats, for all his voluptuous language and spare melancholy, scorned mere dreamers: “The poet and the dreamer are distinct . . . / The one pours out a balm upon the World / The other vexes it.” He practiced realpoetik.

Motion is especially good at making sense of Keats’ letters, some of the wisest and most imaginative documents ever written. There is one aspect of them that is probably of more interest to readers today than any other, and that is Keats’ frequent references to his depression. Though it wracked his life, he seems to have used it as a kind of shamanistic mood. When he writes in one of his poems about “enthralments far more self-destroying,” he is perhaps referring to his spells of blackness.

At the same time, he is alluding to his idea, formulated in one of his most well-known letters, of “negative capability.” Negative capability is the alpine peak of self-forgetfulness in which the poet, who attains such a state, can enter into other moral natures without submitting them to rational moral judgment (let alone to politically partisan appraisal). It is an actor’s gift, and so was Keats’ notion of the “chameleon-poet.” Depression paralyzed Keats, to be sure. Yet it also seems to have helped him into the process of “self-destroying,” which was essential to his imagination.

It’s no wonder, then, that Keats loved the stage and especially the performances of Edmund Kean, the most celebrated actor of his day. He even tried his hand at emulating his beloved Shakespeare and writing plays, but they were dramatically inept and never produced. Still, like Shakespeare, he found solace and power in a protean imaginative existence. The end of the last letter he wrote, to a close friend, catches his sense of life as a series of quickly passing props and scenery just as it wryly and vulnerably evokes the humble role that circumstances had provided him with but which he outwitted: “I can scarcely bid you goodbye even in a letter. I always made an awkward bow.” And politics had little to do with it.