Romantic poetry: The gospel according to John John Keats: A New Life . By Nicholas Roe. Yale University Press; 446 pages; $32.50 and £25. AT FIRST glance, John Keats did not seem an imposing figure. He stood just over five feet tall, with a "small head and faded hands with swollen veins." During his lifetime, he would be dismissed by some as a self-taught "cockney poet" who gave up his medical career to write poetry that was, in another poet's opinion, a "sort of mental masturbation." And yet, by the time he died at 25 in 1821 from tuberculosis, Keats had written some of the finest Romantic poetry. Both shocking and inspiring the Victorian generation following him, after his death he became venerated as a waiflike figure who delighted in "delicious diligent indolence." The posthumous image of him is of an ethereal, fragile poet. Nicholas Roe's biography tries to debunk the mythology that quickly emerged. The Keats that arises from Mr Roe's book is very different from either the cockney bard or the pale romantic adolescent dreaming up wanton females and hallucinogenic poetic imagery of popular imagination. This Keats is "sparkling, tipsy, unpredictable." He likes "women, wine and snuff" and is adept at fencing and boxing. On a trip to Scotland in 1818, he walks over 640 miles in 43 days, returning to London bronzed and dishevelled. Before giving up his medical training, he juggles his work at Guy's Hospital in London with his poetry, writing in the evenings after dressing wounds and helping carry away amputated limbs. He is an avid theatregoer and heavy drinker, often seeking out the company of his male friends to competitively discuss their verse with each another. Mr Roe, an academic, likes the traditional linear form of biography. He starts with Keats's father's death, when his son was eight, from a riding accident just outside London. Mr Roe traces back most of Keats's inspiration to his parents" early deaths. Keats's mother died six years after his father, sensing in his "hopes for poetic glory" a "conversation with his dead parents to whom he could speak in no other way." He evokes the spaces Keats lived and wandered about in and with meticulous research compares different drafts of Keats's poems or his handwriting as a medical student and as a poet. Certain aspects of this biography work less well. Mr Roe often relies on speculation and guesswork. His theme of Keats being haunted by his parents is emphasised at the expense of some of the more interesting parts of the poet's life, such as his relationship with Fanny Brawne. Many of the revelations touched upon by Mr Roe appear in Keats's own letters. However, Mr Roe's biography, if not as new as its subtitle suggests, does manage to capture something of the self-proclaimed "camelion [sic] Poet." With a mind, as Keats complained to Brawne, "put into a body too small for it," Keats was always larger than his slight frame suggested. This biography gives another picture of the man, and suggests there is space for a more expansive view of the poet.