The life mask of John Keats, taken by his friend Benjamin Robert Haydon in December of 1816, when the twenty-year-old poet had only five years to live, reveals a face which even in forced repose seems suffused with sentience. The eyes, whose exact color none of his friends could later remember but whose flashing vivacity none of them ever forgot, are pressed shut while the surface of the skin over the taut rondure of the cheeks and the strangely emphatic mouth appears to breathe life in through every pore with what Keats himself once called “atoms of perception.” The face is disturbingly beautiful; it is a face entirely lacking in those inexpressive tracts, those little fens of inertia, that often mark human features. Keats’s mobility of expression, which all his friends and acquaintances noted as well, is stilled by the grip of plaster and yet there persists a tremulous sense of what I can only term caesura, as though the poet’s features hovered on the verge of some impending quicksilver flutter of transformation.

In a certain intuitive sense the life mask appears to tell us all we need to know of Keats the man: his sensuousness, his delicate intelligence, his powerfully compacted virility of demeanor, even his rather robust melancholy. Still, it would require the shrewdest physiognomist to infer from these features the astonishment of the poetry. It is to the poet’s life, as recorded by his biographers, that we must turn if we are to animate, however