ABSTRACT
Authoritative, satisfied, conclusive, the beginning of Ernest de Selincourt's lecture on the centenary of Keats's death could not be more un-Keatsian. The materials have been gathered, the work completed, the harvest done. Sidney Colvin's 'full and definitive' life of Keats has displayed the 'fine taste' and 'acute judgement of a ripe scholar' that signal the 'book worthy of its noble subject'. Biographies of Keats divide across such extremes, or mediate between them: where nineteenth-century lives of Keats anticipated Bate by presenting a disembodied aesthete, those of the later twentieth century portrayed a material Keats combatively engaged with his times. While the Jennings family noted births and baptisms in their family bible, the Keatses left no such record—a reticence that might reflect back upon the mysterious origins of their father Thomas Keates, whom Gittings came to suspect was illegitimate.
