Darkling I Listen: Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia

The last year of Keats's life, 1820, was a time of great triumph and, as Walsh writes in this gripping but irritatingly melodramatic book, one of great pain. The year before, he had written such extraordinary works of literature as ""On a Grecian Urn,"" ""To a Nightingale,"" ""On Melancholy"" and ""La Belle Dame Sans Merci,"" and when those poems appeared, in July 1820, they were immediately hailed by the British press. But by that time, Keats was already coughing up blood, having contracted, in February of that year, the tuberculosis that was to kill him. In September, accompanied by Joseph Severn, a loyal friend and a painter who in joining the poet damaged his chances of winning a prestigious fellowship, Keats sailed to Rome, where he installed himself in a room overlooking the famous Spanish Steps, hoping to get well, soon preparing to die. Walsh, whose previous books include Midnight Dreary: The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe, draws back the curtain on the 100 days that followed, a long sad scene that has only been glimpsed in other biographies. He is adept at explaining Keats's passions and the deep-rooted morbidity that may have played a role in his much debated relationship with Fanny Brawne, Keats's young lover. Walsh's prose can be grandiloquently banal, but he does evoke the scene, and the reader will be relieved to learn that the pseudo-poetic narration is accomplished without poetic license, as even such phrases as ""the morning sun glinting off the houses"" comes directly from the description of a witness. Walsh is evenhanded and convincing in his account of Keats's last days, a chapter of literary history that certainly belongs on shelves alongside the classic tragedies. (Oct.)