existence the place, the time, and the society in which Keats moved. A host of
commentators have dealt with him solely in his quality as a poet functioning in the
timeless area of universal literature; my endeavour has been to show him as a particular
poet, hindered and assisted by his temperamental bias as a man, writing in a certain milieu.
For this reason, I have considered that no detail which could add vividness to the picture
is unimportant, nothing which could clarify his psychological processes too slight to be
mentioned. Keats’s life was so short that it is possible to follow it with a
minuteness which could not be accorded to a poet who had lived the usual span of
man’s existence. (pp. vii-ix)