In my debut novel, Falling Hour, protagonist Hugh Dalgarno feels a similar ambivalence towards Keats. Hugh grew up as an autodidact in a working-class home. He has felt “haunted” by Keats ever since he first read about his death in a second-hand magazine as a child, and when he begins to reflect on questions of truth and beauty, birdsong and memory, it is to the letters and incidents of Keats’s life that he looks for some kind of guidance.
