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In this innovative hybrid of biography, memoir, and criticism, Eric G. Wilson describes how John Keats gave him solace during a bout of mental illness in spring 2012. While on a tour of the principal sites in Keats’s life—ranging from his London medical school to the small room in Rome where he died—Wilson discovered analogies between the poet’s troubles and his own. He was most struck by Keats’s enlivening vision of the soul.

For Keats, we don’t possess but rather make a soul. We do this by imaginatively transforming our suffering into empathy toward humans and nature alike. Tracking this idea in Keats’s tumultuous yet exhilarating life and work, Wilson struggles to envision his depression anew, desperate to overcome the apathy alienating him from his family.

How to Make a Soul offers fresh perspectives on Keats’s pragmatism, irony, comedy, ethics, and aesthetics, but is above all a lyrical celebration of those galvanizing instances when life springs into art.

John Keats is one of the best-loved, admired, and most frequently studied Romantic poets, though he wrote only three volumes of poetry in his short life. This extraordinary biography looks at how Keats developed as a poet against the backdrop of the major events of his life. John Keats follows the poet through intense family ties and friendships, a medical apprenticeship and subsequent decision to pursue poetry, participation in the literary circles of London, travels within Britain, illness, and finally, death from tuberculosis at age 25. A vivid and authoritative introduction to Keats's remarkable life, John Keats is filled with photographs of landscapes and cityscapes from his life, portraits of the poet and his family, evocative paintings, and manuscripts of his works and letters.