Part biography, part history, part literary commentary, this detailed account of the poetic development of John Keats takes the reader from the poet's early childhood to the months just before his death. The setting is late October 1820, when Keats, having sailed to Italy in the hope the warmer climate would improve his failing health, had to endure 10 days' strict quarantine in the Bay of Naples before being allowed to disembark. Those ten days provide the timescale for this narrative in which the young poet looks back on his life and traces his emergence as the "youth elect," the chosen one of his generation. Inspired in his poetry by Spenser's Faery Queene, by Milton's epic Paradise Lost and by Shakespeare, this is the story of John Keats, not as a Romantic writer, but as a poet-hero in the Classical sense, one who feels compelled to undertake the quest, to explore the darker regions of the psyche and to achieve true enlightenment.