Abstract
John Keats died from tuberculosis in February 1821; he was twenty-five. The story of his short life and death is important to us, and our literature still rewrites, reinterprets, and reapplies whatever lesson we think we can get from the death of what was at the time an obscure English poet. The lesson of his death has often been a cautionary one about what leads to such an early death; whether we like it or not, this tale continues to be retold.
How long is this posthumous life of mine to last?
Keats, as reported by Joseph Severn
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Notes
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.
Michael Klein, ed. Poets for Life: Seventy-Six Poets Respond to Aids (New York: Crown Publishers, 1989).
Simon Watney, Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media, 3rd edition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 9.
Paula Treichler, How to Have Theory in an Epidemic (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 1.
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.
Jahan Ramazani, Poetty of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. xi.
Langdon Hammer, “Art and AIDS; or, How Will Culture Cure You?” Raritan 14 (Winter 1994) 106.
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).
Brooke Hopkins, “Keats and the Uncanny,” Kenyon Review 11 (Fall 1984) 35.
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.
Treichler, How to Have a Theory, p. 5.
Michael Klein and Richard McCann, eds., Things Shaped in Passing: More ‘Poets for Life’ Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (New York: Persea Books, 1997).
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.
Ellis Hanson, “Undead,” in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Identities, ed. Diana Fuss (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 331–3.
Jeff Nunokawa, “All the Sad Young Men: AIDS and the Work of Mourning,” Yale Journal of Criticism 4 (1991) 1.
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).
Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), p. 505.
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.
Keats is thought to have contracted tuberculosis as he nursed Tom.
Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp. 167–8.
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.
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.
Oscar Wilde, The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellman (New York: Random House, 1969), p. 5.
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.
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.
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.
George Gilfillan, A Gallery of Literary Portraits (Edinburgh: William Tale, 1845), p. 383.
See Susan Wolfson, “Feminizing Keats,” in Critical Essays on John Keats, ed. Hermione de Almeida (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1990), p. 318.
Marjorie Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988), p. 4.
Margaret Homans, “Keats Reading Women, Women Reading Keats” Studies in Romanticism 29 (Fall 1990) 341–72.
William Henry Marquess, Lives of the Poet (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1985), p. 2.
Richard Monckton Milnes, Life, Letters, and Literary Remains ofJohn Keats (London: Edward Moxon, 1848), I, 2.
Sidney Colvin, Keats (London: Macmillan, 1887), p. 212.
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.
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.
W.J. Dawson, The Makers of Modern English: A Popular Handbook to the Greater Poets of the Century (New York: Thomas Whittaker, 1890,) pp. 52, 59.
George Speed, “The Real John Keats,” McClure’s Magazine 5:5 (October 1895) 467.
Robert S. Weir, “Thoughts on Keats” New Dominion Monthly 20:4 (April 1877) 299.
See J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975).
See Nicholas Roe, John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), pp. 202–29.
“A Greybeard’s Gossip About his Literary Acquaintance,” New Monthly Magazine 81: 23 (1848) 289.
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.
Herbert Sussman, Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 3.
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.
See Adams, Dandies, pp. 1–5, and Sinfield, Cultural Politics, p. 32.
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.
Byrne Fone, Homophobia: A History (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000), pp. 232–34, 242–46.
Unsigned review, London Magazine (Baldwin’s) II (April 1820) 380–9. In Matthews, Keats, p. 135.
D.M. Moir, Sketches of the Poetical Literature of the Past Half-Century, 3rd edition (Edinburgh: Blackwood and Sons, 1846), p. 23.
Robert Southey, The Remains of Henry Kirke White (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1816), p. 57.
Henry Francis Cary, Lives of the English Poets, from Johnson to Kirke White (London: Henry Bohn, 1846), p. 412.
“The Poets of England Who Died Young: No. 1, Chatterton,” Cambridge University Magazine 1:1 (March 1839) 17.
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.
Unsigned review, Chatterton: A Biographical Study, Daniel Wilson (London: Macmillan, 1870.) Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 107 (1870) 465.
“T.,” “H.K. White” Christian Observer 5:59 (November 1806) 726.
“The Poets of England Who Died Young: John Keats,” Cambridge University Magazine 1:4 (March 1840) 226.
Rufus Griswold, The Poets and Poetry of England in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1846), p. 214.
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.
Bruce Haley, The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 31–2.
See James Heffernan, “Adonais: Shelley’s Consumption of Keats,” Studies in Romanticism 23 (Fall 1994) 295–7.
The Earl of Belfast [Frederick Richard Chichester], Poets and Poetry of the XIXth Century (London: Longman, 1852), p. 81.
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.
Bewell summarizes the etiology of the disease in Romanticism and Colonial Disease, pp. 170–5.
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.
Margaret Oliphant, The Literary History of England, 3 vols. (New York: Macmillan and Sons, 1882), III, 116.
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.
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.
William Sharp, The Life and Letters of Joseph Severn (London: Sampson, Low, Marston, and Co., 1892), p. 37.
Benjamin Robert Haydon to Mary Mitford, 21 April 1821, in Life, Letters, and Table-Talk, p. 208.
William Michael Rossetti, Life ofJohn Keats (London: Walter Scott, 1887), p. 195.
Moir, Sketches, pp. 218–19.
Unsigned review, Monthly Review n.s. xiii (July 1820); in Matthews, Keats, p. 160.
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), p. 18.
Unsigned review, British Critic n.s. 14 (September 1820); in Matthews, p. 231.
Unsigned review of Adonais, Literary Gazette and Journal of Belles Lettres 255 (8 December 1821) 772; in Matthews, p. 245.
“John Keats, a Sketch,” Temple Bar 38 (July 1873) 501.
Blackwood’s 10: 2 (December 1821) 697. Quoted in Matthews, Keats, p. 35.
Arthur Henry Hallam, unsigned review, Englishman’s Magazine (August 1831), I, 616–28; in John Jump, ed. Tennyson: The Critical Heritage (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967), p. 37.
T. Hall Caine, Cobwebs of Criticism (London: Eliot Stock, 1883), p. 183.
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.
Edward Thomas, Feminine Influence on the Poets (London: Martin Secker, 1924), p. 327.
Christopher Craft, Another Kind of Love: Male Homosexual Desire in English Discourse 1850–1920 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1994), p. xvi.
Dowling, Hellenism, p. 26. Thais Morgan discusses the Buchanan essay in “Victorian Effeminacies,” in Victorian Sexual Dissidence, ed. Richard Dellamora (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 109–26.
Digby Dolben, The Poems of Digby Mackworth Dolben, ed. with a memoir by Robert Bridges (London: Henry Frowde, Oxford University Press, 1911), p. 101.
Marlon Ross, “Beyond the Fragmented Word: Keats at the Limits of Patrilineal Language,” in Out of Bounds: Male Writers and Gender(ed) Criticism, ed. Laura Claridge and Elizabeth Langland (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), pp. 115–16.
McFarland, The Masks ofKeats, p. 105.
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.
David Masson, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Other Essays (London: Macmillan, 1874), p. 170.
See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, (New York: Vintage, 1977), pp. 25–6.
Unsigned review, Edinburgh Review 90 (October 1849); in Matthews, p. 343.
Certainly notions of homosexuality as a disease, as outlined by Simon Watney, may come into play here. See Watney, Policing Desire, pp. 21–4.
Dan Latimer, “Erotic Susceptibility and Tuberculosis: Literary Images of a Pathology” MLN 105 (1990) 1021.
William Courthope, The Liberal Movement in English Literature (London: John Murray, 1885), p. 182.
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.
Unsigned review article, “The Life of John Keats” (attributed by Matthews to Samuel Phillips) The Times, 19 September 1848), p. 3; in Matthews, Keats, p. 324.
Henry T. Tuckerman, Thoughts on the Poets (New York: C.S. Francis, 1846), p. 247.
H. Buxton Forman, The Poetical Works of John Keats, and Other Writings (London: Reeves and Turner, 1889), I, xxv.
Aubrey de Vere, Edinburgh Review XC (October 1849); in Matthews, Keats, p. 342.
Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, p. 29.
“Iluscenor” (attributed to Bryan Wailer Procter), “Recollections of Books and Their Authors: No. 6, John Keats, the Poet” The Olio I ( 23 June 1828); in Matthews, Keats, p. 256.
Edmund Gosse, Critical Kit-Kats, 3 vols. (London: Heinemann, 1913), III, 23.
Oliphant, Literary History, III, 112.
William Howitt, Homes and Haunts of the Most Celebrated English Poets (New York: Harper and Bros., 1856), I, 475.
Bate, John Keats, p. 113. Ordinarily one would take this use of “limp” as a homophobic tic. But it raises a real question. It is possible that the motivation for Severn’s depiction of Keats and his affection for Keats comes from an attraction to his own sex. Severn did marry, though late, and had five children. He lived into his eighties.
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.
Oscar Wiide, The Artist as Critic, ed. Richard Hilman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 4.
Donald Parson, Portraits of Keats (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1954), p. 52.
Quoted in Sharp, Life, p. 148.
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.
Reynolds to Taylor, 21 September 1820, in Rollins, Keats Circle, I, 157.
Quoted in Sharp, Life, p. 152.
Jennifer Davis Michael, “Pectoriloquy: The Narrative of Consumption in the Letters of Keats” European Romantic Review 6:1 (Summer 1995) 52.
Quoted in Sharp, Life, p. vi.
Louis Crompton, Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in 19th-Century England (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 72–4.
Andrew Elfenbein notes that “geniuses” are encouraged to make male friendships in the early nineteenth century. Isaac d’Israeli praises male friendships for them. Elfenbein, Romantic Genius, p. 33.
Quoted in Sharp, Life, pp. 125–6.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose: Authoritative Texts, Criticism, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1977), p. 392.
William Graham, “Keats and Severn,” New Review 10: 60 (May 1894) 593.
Charles Kent, Footprints on the Road (London: Chapman and Hall, 1864), p. 289.
Severn to Brown, 17 January 1830; quoted in Sharp, Life, p. 162.
William Michael Rossetti, p. 54.
Unsigned article, “The Poet Keats” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 55: 127 (1877) 359.
Eric Robertson, “A Reminiscence of Severn,” Dublin University Review 96 (1881) 22.
A. Montagu Woodford, ed. The Book of Sonnets (London: Saunders and Otley, 1841), p. 42.
William Graham, “Keats and Severn,” p. 604.
See Sedgwick, Between Men, pp. 21–8.
William Sharp, “The Portraits of Keats, with Special Reference to those by Severn
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Najarian, J. (2002). Keats’s “Posthumous Life”: Corpus and Body. In: Victorian Keats. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230596856_2
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