KEATS.\o7 By Andrew Motion\f7 .\o7 Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 636 pp., $35\f7

Keats became immortal, and then he died. That's not to say he grew famous during his lifetime. He was, in fact, famously neglected by the critics of his day, when he was not being mauled by them. But he spent his 25 years on Earth communing so directly with eternity that when his end finally came, he fell right into the arms of posterity.

Even if temperament hadn't, circumstances would have given Keats an aptitude for expressing first and last things the same way that some people are born athletes, musicians or craftsmen. He lost his father when he was 8, his mother six years later and his beloved brother Tom eight years after that. Both Keats' mother and his brother died of consumption, and Keats himself fatally contracted the disease on a walking tour through England's Lake Country and Scotland when he was about 23.

Poverty dogged him. His father, working as a young man as a hostler at a livery stable and inn called The Swan and Hoop, married the establishment's daughter and inherited the business. Though he left a substantial amount of money to his wife when he died, she remarried badly, soon separating from her second husband, who by law took control of her estate, along with The Swan and Hoop, and gave nothing to his stepchildren.

Although Keats' grandfather left considerable bequests in trust for John and his two brothers and sister, the money stayed locked up for years in Dickensian proceedings. Worst of all, the guardian, whom Keats' grandmother appointed to administer her husband's estate, was at best a stingy, sanctimonious Philistine and at worst an outright thief. It's not hard to understand why Keats first chose the security of a medical career, becoming an apothecary, not quite a doctor but one who frequently fulfilled a doctor's function with the poor. Yet Keats' decision to abruptly leave his internship, along with an almost profligate generosity to his friends, ensured a life of impoverishment for him. He lacked the money to marry the young woman he fell in love with, Fanny Brawne--he also quickly discovered there was no point in marrying her since he was dying--and expired penniless in 1821 in Rome in the arms of his dear friend, Joseph Severn. Keats was rich in friends.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (he met Keats only once and later said he knew immediately that Keats was dying) wrote that Keats had long tried to reconcile his personality with infinity. Various English romantics took on that task in different ways: Wordsworth dramatized his past, Byron enacted himself, Shelley decked himself out in ideas and set them marching in images (that sometimes broke under the strain).