‘O weep for Adonais, he is dead’, mourned Shelley in the pastoral elegy he wrote for Keats, whose accelerated creativity and extreme youth at the time of his death has helped to secure him a place in the canon or ‘immortal freemasonry’ towards which the poet yearned. Shelley’s figure of Adonais derives from various myths of sacrifice: from Greek mythology, for example, where the beautiful, effeminate youths Adonis, Narcissus, and Hyacinthus – with whom Shelley associates not just Keats, but poets generally – all die young and are resurrected annually as the flowers associated with their names. And it derives partly from the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, whose nurturing of futurity with his blood associates his story with pagan fertility festivals: ‘He was despised and rejected, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.’

Shelley’s Adonaïs contributed to the myth inherited by the later nineteenth century of a hypersensitive Keats destroyed by the brutal forces of the critical establishment (‘snuffed out by an article’, as Byron more sneeringly put it in Don Juan). In this myth, the tea merchant guardian of the Keats children, Richard Abbey, becomes a representative philistine, prophesying ‘a speedy Termination to [Keats’s] inconsiderate Enterprise’ of abandoning the medical profession and becoming a poet. As so often, the story turns out to be a myth in both senses: a fabrication, no less than a powerful story expressing a collective insight or anxiety. The truth is that tuberculosis debilitates the sturdiest of mortals, and that, far from being naturally ethereal and retiring, before he contracted the disease, Keats was athletic, edgy, and prone to belligerence – his self-consciousness about his shortness exaggerating a natural misogyny. Having said that, Keats was also extremely companionable and, it turned out, lovable, inspiring a jealous protectiveness in his friends and family and fiancée. And in his biographers.

‘A man’s life is a continual allegory’, said Keats in one of his many marvellous letters, and ‘like the bible, figurative’. However successful certain people have been in living their own lives, in other words – or of going about their deaths in their own peculiar ways – their lives and deaths have not been theirs alone to read and to reflect upon. They belong, at least in the long run, to posterity. Poets, artists of all kinds, loom large in the annals of biography precisely because of the commentary upon their lives, and upon life, they leave us in the form of their works. What makes Keats the perfect subject, beyond the concentrated pathos of the sudden flowering of his genius, his rapid decline, and early death, is the extraordinary commentary offered upon life by his poetry and letters, always the first authority for the biographer and the greatest drawcard for the reader.

In its reliance upon this commentary, Denise Gigante’s The Keats Brothers is no exception, though there is less of Keats’s poetry and letters than we would normally expect from a narrative covering the years of poetic quickening and consummation from the publication of the Poems (1817) through the composition and savaging of Endymion to the annus mirabilis of 1818–19. What makes Gigante’s approach different – different from Walter Jackson Bate’s still classic account of 1963 and Andrew Motion’s painstaking 600-page reconstruction of 1997, and different from R.S. White’s recent A Literary Life (2010) – is her determination to weave the life of the poet back into the family woof, to see the Keats siblings John, George, Tom, and Fanny as their own most relevant personal and social unit, ‘unmoored’ and isolated from society as they were by the early deaths of their parents – he from a freak accident, she from the consumption that would kill Tom, John, and (nineteen years after John) George.

Of the poet’s three siblings the youngest, Fanny, remains shadowy in Gigante’s narrative, Tom dies, and it is George who especially intrigues and preoccupies the narrator: the middle brother and businessman who emigrated to America in 1818, returned briefly after a financial disaster to raise more money in 1819, and went back to America, eventually to die there in 1841. It is George’s life that generates everything that is rich and strange about the biography, and there is much to relish in Gigante’s extensively researched and detailed account of the American republic during the early decades of the nineteenth century. George Keats has not had a good press among his brother’s biographers. Keats’s friend and erstwhile protector, Charles Brown, hated him, first for abandoning the poet and the dying Tom and going to America, then for abandoning the dying John and, in spite of promises, contributing nothing to the poet’s upkeep during his dying months. Biographers have struggled to get over this, but Gigante is successful enough in exhuming George’s reputation to justify spending nearly half a book on his fortunes in America.

Gigante, however, aspires to more than just a long, exotic excursion from the life of the poet. At one stage in George’s journey through America, she allows a cast of contemporary characters to debate the virtues of the planned city of Philadelphia, some of them impressed by the technological sophistication of its amenities and its sense of settled order and regularity, others depressed by them: the city was ‘built too much in the shape of a chessboard to be beautiful,’ remarked the British diplomat Sir Augustus Foster. ‘Rather than a square, however,’ Gigante counters, ‘Philadelphia took the shape of a parallelogram.’ So do the two Keats brothers’ lives in Gigante’s account – or their life, if we are to believe the subtitle: The Life (singular) of John and George.

Gigante is interested in symmetries, reiterations, canny, and uncanny parallels in the single life of two temperamentally and geographically ‘bifurcated’ brothers. John, for example, is the Cockney poet in the sense defined or dictated by John Gibson Lockhart when he began his venomous campaign against Leigh Hunt and his Cockney acolytes: urban, lower middle class, aspiring, classically illiterate. George, on the other hand, is the ‘Cockney Pioneer’, the acolyte of Morris Birkbeck and George Flower and their dream of utopian settlement in the ‘Land of Cockaigne’. John is the fretful artist, the upwardly mobile genius who suffers the caprices of fate and reputation. George, though more grounded, is a dreamer, too, a commercial dreamer, the entrepreneur who invests in mills and riverboats in the New World and loses it all – twice, as it happens; first by hitching his fortunes too closely to the bird artist and speculator, John James Audubon, then finally, and with finality, in the crash of 1837. As with the Muse, there are times when the stockmarket will not be wooed and won. The exotic landscapes of Keats’s romances have their counterpart in the romantic landscapes of an exotic America, and just as the first only thinly disguise the pain and suffering of existence, so, under the magnifying glass, the American dream reveals the decidedly dystopian features of slavery and commercial exploitation.

In the end, I am not convinced by Gigante’s parallelogram, which is constructed (as Keats said of his own Miltonic Hyperion) ‘in an artist’s humour’. Whether the parallels she contrives have anything to tell us about the poet is doubtful. It takes more than his brother George’s being in America to put ‘John’s life and work in a transatlantic context’, and it is worth reminding ourselves of Keats’s lack of interest in America. Having said that, however, the American passages in The Keats Brothers have their own fascination and are a welcome excursion from the otherwise familiar terrain of biographical scholarship on Keats.