Lets talk: Keats biographies

I recently finished Andrew Motions bio on Keats. I want to start by saying I think it was a very good, well researched biography. It moved fluidly, and I was able to finish it in a relatively short time thanks to Motions easy to read style.

But, of course, I think there are some draw backs to the bio. I have found now in all of the bios that relate to Keats or the romantics that I've read, I've been faced with only one really major drawback: each author works so hard to prove a point that somewhere along the line, things get, well...annoying.

Motions bio is a great point. He works so hard to stress that Keats was not a mamby-pamby, weak poet sitting alone on a hill, but in fact a robust, political poet, that it got to the point that I just kind of stopped caring. Obviously Keats was interested and influenced by the politics of the time, he hung out out Leigh Hunt for the love of Pete, but Motion got carried away trying to prove that Keats was a political poet. He isn't Shelley (THANK GOD for that!).

There where times where hearing about English politics just became too much for me, and I'm even a bit of a history buff. And more importantly, there were times when Keats was just lost from the text because of this obsessive emphasis on his politics.

In another bio on him, 'Posthumous Keats', the author Stanley Plumly works so hard to prove his point that Keats was a physician poet, that there were times where I felt that I was losing Keats to the ideas about Keats.

What I'm trying to say is that I'm kind of tired of hearing all these ideas about Keats. All of this analysis and speculating and working so hard to prove a scholarly point is, I feel, getting in the way of learning anything about John Keats himself. Why can't biographers just talk about what happened in Keats life and talk about his poetry without having to become all scholarly about it and prove some "new point" about him.

A new biography is coming out in October about Keats and his relationship with his brothers, taking the angle that those relationships defined him more than any others. I'm curious to read it, but I also think that all of this speculation is silly at times. Maybe a non "scholar" should just write a bio on him, so we can read something about him, not about ideas about him.

He lived, he died...now let us just read about him in peace!