John Keats: A New: Life by Nicholas Roe

Abstract

Nicholas Roe. John Keats: A New Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Pp. xxvii+446. $22. On 8 July 1819 under a full moon, John Keats wrote in one of his first letters to Fanny Brawne about a comet that was burning through the heavens over London for several consecutive nights that month, an astronomical phenomenon that he marks out emotionally as a figuration of the woman with whom he was falling deeply in love: have seen your Comet, he told her (331). As Nicholas Roe explains in this pathbreaking biography of Keats, [n]ight after night Fanny's comet hung brightly overhead, apparently as stationary and unchanging as the stars yet in reality a transient visitor returned fleetingly from its long traverse, a cosmological experience that, Roe suggests, likely allowed Keats to unlock his sentiments and passions and compose his sonnet (c. 1819), memorializing his relationship with Brawne (331). Having conscientiously studied John Bonnycastle's An Introduction to Astronomy (1807) during his schoolboy days at Clarke's Academy at Enfield in suburban London, Keats had been, since his early youth, a careful watcher of the skies, and his preoccupation with the heavens and their constellations carried on even into his painful final letter to Charles Annitage Brown of 30 November 1820, less than three months before the poet died in Rome of tuberculosis in the winter of 1821, aged 25: have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence, wrote Keats, There was my star predominant! (390). Following Keats's lead, Roe is correct to make much throughout his biography of the subtle yet crucial ways in which the poet came to associate his life with the heavens above him, and while this feature of Roe's book might initially appear as simply a minor, artful motif, this aspect of the biography runs from the first to the final chapter and is symptomatic of a broader, transformative approach to representing and understanding Keats's life as a whole. For Roe, Keats was always keenly aware of the ways in which the physical universe enveloping him and unfolding around him came to shape his inner emotions, thoughts, sensations, questions, compulsions, and convictions. Such an approach to Keats is a critical one for Roe to adopt because it allows him to break away from a longstanding tradition of thinking about and depicting Keats's life as one primarily (if not utterly) determined by and enacted within what Paul de Man regarded as the abstract intellectual space of the aesthetic realm. Of course, de Man's attribution simply followed suit with much earlier imaginings of Keats, such as those famously provided by Oscar Wilde and others who envisioned him as a tragically divine emotional spirit disconnected from the worlds of reality around him. Likewise, Wilde's understanding of Keats can itself be traced back to both Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, who in Adonais (1821) and Don Juan (1819-24), respectively, established Keats in terms of Romantic myth as a figure of legendary genius with a troubled soul. This Romantic vision of Keats as a delicate mental and spiritual essence not meant for a long mortal life set the stage for a range of twentieth-century biographers who similarly came to see the poet as a tragic creature, such that when Andrew Motion largely represented Keats in these terms in his magisterial Keats: A Biography (1997), he was following in the footsteps of Amy Lowell and her much earlier two-volume John Keats (1925), perhaps the most important early twentieth-century biography to cast the poet in this light. Furthermore, a number of twenty-first-century critics and artists have generally taken this route as well--including Stanley Plumly (2008) and Jane Campion, whose film Bright Star (2009), focusing on the tragic final three years of the poet's life and especially his heartrending relationship with Brawne, was inspired by and modeled upon Motion's book. …