Burgess quotes the American poet, Robert Penn Warren, who said that the great nineteenth-century poets were Keats and Belli. Burgess began translating Belli's sonnets before he conceived his Keats novel – indeed, significantly, whilst he was working on his translation of the amorous sonnets of Cyrano de Bergerac. In the end Burgess translated "seventy-odd" of the sonnets. Liana Burgess pointed out to me that he translated them into a Manchester voice, an English version of the harsh, guttural Roman Italian. He confined himself to the theological ones that "gave full scope to the employment of the blasphemy of the Roman gutters". He speculates in his Confessions that Keats, if he had lived, might have learned to employ the colloquial, the obscene, the blasphemous. Like Belli.

Burgess's Keats, too, has things in common with his inventor. He was told in 1960 that he had an inoperable brain tumour and a year to live. He began writing novels to make money for his widow-to-be (his first wife Lynne) and wrote fluently and furiously under the pressure of the death sentence. Burgess's Keats is young, of a poor family, and a resolute atheist who believes that his end is final. He is also a European – he speaks at the beginning of the novel of the god, his god, Apollo, and his classical learning gives him the breadth Burgess's own education gave him. Burgess uses Keats's sonnet on a cat, with its spitting consonants and material solidity, to excellent effect – and he uses the voice (one of Keats's voices) of restless, mocking punning which recurs in the light poems and the letters. The wonderful scatological bravura passage from Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy which Burgess's Keats recites to cheer his friend Elton is in fact quoted at length by Keats in a letter to George and Georgiana Keats. Both the cat sonnet and the Burton quotation have a roughness and a force in common with Burgess's renderings of Belli.

The story of Keats's tragic death is well known, and dramatising it against its true outline, at once stark and full of beautiful and terrible detail, is a difficult task.