Historical fiction? Biography? Poetic theory? Translation? Spoofs and fakes (if there is such a category)? [Abba Abba] is an entertaining and thought-provoking production (let us play safe), based on the rather nice speculative idea that John Keats might have met, during the last months of his life in Rome, the Roman dialect poet Giuseppe Belli. The first half of the book describes this imaginary encounter and how it might have affected both writers….

Keats himself, in a not unsympathetic but not wholly convincing characterization, appears as an aggressive atheist, sex-tormented, witty, Hamletlike, as pun-prone as Joyce, driven to hysteria by the clucking ministrations of Sabrina fair (as he calls Severn). The growling, talented, self-doubting Belli, writer of thousands of vivid, obscene, blasphemous, satirical sonnets ironically (iron-ically, Mr Burgess's Keats might add) armoured in strict Petrarchan form (hence the abba abba of the title, though it also refers to...