(Download) "Writing Keats's Last Days: Severn, Sharp, And Romantic Biography." by Studies in Romanticism ~ Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Writing Keats's Last Days: Severn, Sharp, And Romantic Biography.
- Author : Studies in Romanticism
- Release Date : January 22, 2003
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 232 KB
Description
OVER THE YEARS, THE DRAMATIC STORY OF KEATS'S FINAL MONTHS HAS been told and retold by biographers of the poet, who have dwelt at length on the voyage to Italy, the ten-day quarantine in the Bay of Naples, the progress from Naples to Rome, and the last days in the tiny room above the Piazza di Spagna. The narrative of the poet's "posthumous life," as Keats himself called it, has become one of the most moving and memorable in all of literary history. Although Keats suffered a long and wasting illness, the image of him that has prevailed in the modern mind is ironically one of imaginative health. Biographers have focused less on Keats's tuberculosis, on his sick and decaying body, than on his "adhesive empathy" and "sympathetic openness," (1) stressing the infectiousness of his concern for others rather than his disease. (2) The poet represented here confronts his death in a "calm and philosophical" frame of mind, his "doctrines of negative capability and soul-making [coming] to his rescue at the last" (Gittings 611, 621). In this estimate, it is his nobility--his behavior as an English gentleman rather than as a consumptive patient--that has garnered attention, as scholars have focused on his "manly reticence" (Bate 676), "wordless fortitude" (Ward 395), and "gallantry." (3) Thus have the last months come to assume the status of moral allegory, Keats suffering an exemplary death that instructs us about the virtues of masculine stoicism and selfless courage. In our time this has become a story about the etiquette of dying well. (4) It is curious that a tale with such powerful currency depends on a single witness. Although they note it in passing, biographers have not made very much of the fact that there is only one first-hand source for the events of Keats's final five months. Except for a few brief letters by Dr. James Clark, Keats's attending physician in Rome, the only significant testimony derives from the letters and memoirs of Joseph Severn, the artist who accompanied the poet to Italy, whose patient devotion to his dying friend has also become legendary. Others met Keats in Rome--including Lt. Isaac Elton, William Ewing, John Gibson, Seymour Kirkup, and the Spanish novelist Valentin Llanos, who later married Keats's sister Fanny--but none of these men has left an account of the meeting. (5) It is only Severn who kept a detailed record of Keats's decline and then returned to the subject in a series of memoirs written at various points over the course of his long life.