Andrew Motion, Keats. London: Faber and Faber, 1997. ISBN: 0-571-17227-X (hardback). Price: £20

Andrew Motion has turned from Philip Larkin to Keats; to a poet who never grew old from one who pretended never to have been young. It seems an odd transition, to Keats the 'unchariest' of poets, from Larkin who seems to have been chary of just about everything. They are not all unlike, of course, for what two people could be? Keats told his friend Benjamin Bailey, in a characteristic moment of abashed self-knowledge: 'I am certain I have not a right feeling towards Women', and the same could be said of Larkin in trumps. And in some ways the biographical problem is similar. Keats wrote his own best biography in his letters, and Motion's job, like that of all the biographers before him, is to link his quotations from the letters with a commentary that avoids being shamed by the prose that it punctuates. In the biography of Larkin, too, Motion's great resource is the cache of letters to and from Larkin to which he had access, but no-one would claim that Larkin's letters are remotely as good as Keats's. Why is it, then, that the biography of Larkin is so consistently enthralling, whereas in reading Keats one finds oneself from time to time stifling a yawn? The obvious answer is no doubt the true one. In Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life the material is quite new, so that as one reads one shares with Motion a sad wonderment at the life from which the poems were produced. In Keats Motion has nothing new to tell us, no significant facts that are not there already in the 1960s biographies by Bate, Ward and Gittings. More recent scholarship has allowed Motion to offer a fuller account of Keats's Enfield school and of his medical training, but this takes us only up to the time when Keats's life becomes fully absorbing, the time when he began to write his poems. Motion's response is to place on the familiar events of Keats's life a different emphasis. The dominant current trend in Keats studies was inaugurated by Jerome McGann in his 1979 essay, 'Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism', and has since been developed by critics such as Marjorie Levinson, Daniel Watkins, Susan Wolfson and Nicholas Roe. If, and it is a rather big if, we agree that Bate, Ward and Gittings offer us the Keats that had been produced by the New Criticism of the 1950s, then we might applaud Motion for producing a Keats that has been constructed as a biographical subject by the historicist critics of the 1980s and 1990s. But the problem remains that my list of modern critics, though all of them are in some sense historicist in their methods, is a little like the list of Keats's patriotic heroes that is offered by Motion as a guarantee of Keats's radical sympathies—'King Arthur, Robin Hood, John Milton, Algernon Sidney'—not very homogenous. Nicholas Roe's Keats is not much like Marjorie Levinson's, and neither is at all like McGann's. In his introduction Motion whirls giddily between these very different mentors, but in the biography itself it is Keats as he has appeared to the British historicist critics who dominates, a kind of Old Labour Keats, decent, robust, radical, a proper poet to be a friend of Hazlitt's, and a poet that one would expect Michael Foot to admire. It is a representation of the poet that has its own truth—it is a fact, after all, that Hazlitt was Keats's most admired acquaintance—but it is a representation that has provoked the most destructive review of the biography yet to …