Keats’s “Posthumous Life”: Corpus and Body

See, for example, Melissa F. Zeiger, Beyond Consolation: Death, Sexuality, and the Changing Shapes of Elegy (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. 107–34; and James Miller, “Dante on Fire Island: Reinventing Heaven in the AIDS Elegy,” in Writing AIDS: Gay Literature, Culture, and Analysis, ed. Timothy F. Murphy and Suzanne Poirier (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 265–305.Google Scholar

Michael Klein, ed. Poets for Life: Seventy-Six Poets Respond to Aids (New York: Crown Publishers, 1989).Google Scholar

Simon Watney, Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media, 3rd edition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 9.Google Scholar

Paula Treichler, How to Have Theory in an Epidemic (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 1.Google Scholar

A list of some of the more important works on these social meanings would include, in addition to Watney and Treichler: Steven Epstein, Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 45–53; David Black, The Plague Years (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985); Dennis Altman, AIDS and the New Puritanism (London: Pluto Press, 1986); and Tim Dean, Beyond Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 94–173.Google Scholar

Jahan Ramazani, Poetty of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. xi.Google Scholar

Langdon Hammer, “Art and AIDS; or, How Will Culture Cure You?” Raritan 14 (Winter 1994) 106.Google Scholar

Unless otherwise noted, hereafter all quotations of Keats’s poetry cite John Keats: Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978).Google Scholar

Brooke Hopkins, “Keats and the Uncanny,” Kenyon Review 11 (Fall 1984) 35.Google Scholar

Ramazani comments, in writing about other elegies by Rich, that she seems ever wary of “using the dead” as material for poetry. Ramazani, Poetry of Mouming, p. 321.Google Scholar

Treichler, How to Have a Theory, p. 5. Google Scholar

Michael Klein and Richard McCann, eds., Things Shaped in Passing: More ‘Poets for Life’ Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (New York: Persea Books, 1997).Google Scholar

See also Douglas Crimp, “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic,” in AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,1988), especially pp. 237–46; Simon Watney, Practices of Freedom: Selected Writings on HIV/AIDS (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 98–100; Daniel Harris, The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture (New York: Hyperion, 1997), pp. 233–4; and Dean, Beyond Sexuality, pp. 128–9.Google Scholar

Ellis Hanson, “Undead,” in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Identities, ed. Diana Fuss (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 331–3.Google Scholar

Jeff Nunokawa, “All the Sad Young Men: AIDS and the Work of Mourning,” Yale Journal of Criticism 4 (1991) 1.Google Scholar

Shilts’s constant contact with Camus’s text suggests a whole series of questions about AIDS as a “plague,” explored by Susan Sontag in AIDS and its Metaphors (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1989).Google Scholar

Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), p. 505.Google Scholar

And still do. See Proma Tagore, “Keats in an Age of Consumption: the ‘Ode to a Nightingale,’ Keats-Shelley Review 49 (2000) 67–84. For details of the possible connection, see Russell, Baron Brock, John Keats and Joseph Severn: The Tragedy of the Last Illness (London: Keats-Shelley Memorial Association, 1973), pp. 17–18.Google Scholar

Keats is thought to have contracted tuberculosis as he nursed Tom.Google Scholar

Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp. 167–8.Google Scholar

Severn’s version of the writing of “Bright Star” tale has been disproved in our own century, most notably by Robert Gittings, along with many of Severn’s truths. Keats actually wrote the poem several years before. Robert Gittings, John Keats (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968), pp. 262–3, 415. For a fuller account, see Michio Sugano, “Was ‘Keats’s Last Sonnet’ Really Written on Board the Maria Crowther?,” Studies in Romanticism 34 (Fall 1995) 413–40.Google Scholar

See Jeffrey Robinson, Reception and Poetics; and Andrew Bennett, Keats, Narrative and Audience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), especially pp. 15–35; and his Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 2–8 and 139–57.Google Scholar

Oscar Wilde, The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellman (New York: Random House, 1969), p. 5.Google Scholar

Richard A. Kaye discusses how the image of St. Sebastian became an icon of transgressive sexuality in the nineteenth century in his essay ‘“Determined Raptures’: St. Sebastian and the Victorian Discourse of Decadence,” Victorian Literature and Culture (1999) 269–303.Google Scholar

George Matthews calls this strain of argument a “sexual-social critique.” See G.F. Matthews, Keats: the Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), pp. 17–40.Google Scholar

Selected British Poets and New Elegant Extracts from Chaucer to the Present Time, with Critical Remarks (1824), II, 15; in Matthews, Keats, p. 248. Authorship is attributed by Rollins to Hunt.Google Scholar

George Gilfillan, A Gallery of Literary Portraits (Edinburgh: William Tale, 1845), p. 383.Google Scholar

See Susan Wolfson, “Feminizing Keats,” in Critical Essays on John Keats, ed. Hermione de Almeida (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1990), p. 318.Google Scholar

Marjorie Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988), p. 4.Google Scholar

Margaret Homans, “Keats Reading Women, Women Reading Keats” Studies in Romanticism 29 (Fall 1990) 341–72.Google Scholar

William Henry Marquess, Lives of the Poet (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1985), p. 2.Google Scholar

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Haydon to Mitford, 21 April 1821, in The Life, Letters, and Table-Talk of Benjamin Robert Haydon, ed. Henry Stoddard (New York: Scribner, Armstrong, 1876), p. 208.Google Scholar

Susan Wolfson, in her most recent essay on Keats and gender, senses these cross-purposes in his friends’ attempts to puff up his reputation: “the favorable reviews, mostly from friends, gave an inadvertently feminizing emphasis to his stylistic beauties.” See Susan Wolfson, “Keats and Gender Criticism,” in The Persistence of Poetry: Bicentennial Essays on Keats, ed. Robert M. Ryan and Ronald A. Sharp (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), p. 88.Google Scholar

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See J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975).Google Scholar

See Nicholas Roe, John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), pp. 202–29.Google Scholar

“A Greybeard’s Gossip About his Literary Acquaintance,” New Monthly Magazine 81: 23 (1848) 289.Google Scholar

Claudia Nelson, Boys Will Be Girls: The Feminine Ethic and British Children’s Fiction, 1857–1917 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991), pp. 7–10.Google Scholar

Herbert Sussman, Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 3.Google Scholar

See James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Manhood (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995). For Adams, Victorian writers claim their authorship as a masculine discipline on the lines of the roles of the prophet, dandy, priest, and soldier (p. 2). Jeffrey Weeks locates the shift to an aggressive definition of masculinity, supported most notably by Charles Kingsley, in the 1860s. See his Sex, Politics, and Sexuality: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800 (London: Longman, 1981), p. 40.Google Scholar

See Adams, Dandies, pp. 1–5, and Sinfield, Cultural Politics, p. 32.Google Scholar

See Ed Cohen, Talk on the Wilde Side: Toward a Genealogy of Discourse on Male Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 136; and Sinfield, Cultural Politics, pp. 15–17.Google Scholar

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D.M. Moir, Sketches of the Poetical Literature of the Past Half-Century, 3rd edition (Edinburgh: Blackwood and Sons, 1846), p. 23.Google Scholar

Robert Southey, The Remains of Henry Kirke White (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1816), p. 57.Google Scholar

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Maria Grazia Lolla, ‘“Truth Sacrificing to the Muses’: Rowley and the Genesis of the Romantic Chatterton,” in Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture, ed. Nick Groom (New York and Basingstoke: Macmillan — now Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), pp. 166–7.Google Scholar

Unsigned review, Chatterton: A Biographical Study, Daniel Wilson (London: Macmillan, 1870.) Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 107 (1870) 465.Google Scholar

“T.,” “H.K. White” Christian Observer 5:59 (November 1806) 726.Google Scholar

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See George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), pp. 27–36.Google Scholar

Bruce Haley, The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 31–2.Google Scholar

See James Heffernan, “Adonais: Shelley’s Consumption of Keats,” Studies in Romanticism 23 (Fall 1994) 295–7.Google Scholar

The Earl of Belfast [Frederick Richard Chichester], Poets and Poetry of the XIXth Century (London: Longman, 1852), p. 81.Google Scholar

Illness as Metaphor concerns the competing metaphors surrounding tuber-culosis in the last century and cancer in our own. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Anchor, 1978). Writers on tuberculosis have a hard time not writing about the disease metaphorically.Google Scholar

Bewell summarizes the etiology of the disease in Romanticism and Colonial Disease, pp. 170–5.Google Scholar

Clark was treating Keats in the customary way, and he was a kind, efficient man. He hired a piano for Severn to play for Keats and loaned copies of Haydn’s symphonies. Most important, he intervened with the Italian banker Torlonia when Severn’s funds threatened to dry up. But Clark was perhaps not a very good doctor; he later became physician to Queen Victoria and became famous for his deadly medical gaffes. It was he who examined the unmarried Flora Hastings, one of Victoria’s ladies-in-waiting, and declared her pregnant. Hastings was dismissed. When she died months later of what turned out to have been a huge ovarian cyst, there was considerable public outcry. He later bungled royally once more, when he failed to recognize Prince Albert’s fatal illness as typhoid.Google Scholar

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See Bewell, Romanticism, pp. 170–1. Bewell also speculates on the tropical or colonial language used to depict or imply the disease, pp. 173–5.Google Scholar

Severn to Haslam, 5 May 1821, in Hyder Rollins, The Keats Circle: Letters and Papers, 2nd edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), II, 239.Google Scholar

William Sharp, The Life and Letters of Joseph Severn (London: Sampson, Low, Marston, and Co., 1892), p. 37.Google Scholar

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Blackwood’s 10: 2 (December 1821) 697. Quoted in Matthews, Keats, p. 35.Google Scholar

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Wolfson, “Feminizing Keats,” p. 330. Ayumi Mizukoshi has traced this luxury to Leigh Hunt ‘s ideals of poetry as an accessible form of luxury for the middle classes. See her Keats, Hunt and the Aesthetics of Pleasure (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), pp. 9–24.Google Scholar

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The poem is reprinted in Brian Reade, ed., Sexual Heretics: Male Homosexuality in English Literature from 1850 to 1900 (New York: Coward-McCann, 1971), pp. 360–2.Google Scholar

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See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, (New York: Vintage, 1977), pp. 25–6.Google Scholar

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Certainly notions of homosexuality as a disease, as outlined by Simon Watney, may come into play here. See Watney, Policing Desire, pp. 21–4.Google Scholar

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The source for this story is Coleridge’s Table Talk (August 14, 1820); quoted in Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 468. But Andrew Motion notes that it does not agree with Keats’s own account of their meeting. See Andrew Motion, Keats (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1997), p. 366.Google Scholar

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And Severn made it clear he did not approve of Hinton’s version, writing to Milnes to prevent him from using Hinton’s version as a frontispiece; “it makes such a sneaking fellow of (Keats).” Severn to Milnes, 23 March 1868; in Rollins, Keats Circle, II, 329.Google Scholar

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They often stated their cases with great rancor. See Charles Dilke’s bitter letter to Joseph Severn over what he perceives as loss in position as one of Keats’s friends, April 1841, in Rollins, Keats Circle, II, 103–6.Google Scholar

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Quoted in Sharp, Life, p. 152.Google Scholar

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