‘—My Brother Tom is Much Improved—’: The Suffering Body at the Ends of Keats’s Letters and Poems

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article re-examines the impact on Keats’s poetics of his brother Tom’s illness and death by paying attention to the disregarded references to Tom’s feverish body in the framing sections at the beginning and ends of Keats’s letters. While many critics have sought to abstract from these letters Keats’s literary and philosophical ideas, I resituate his memorable metaphysical passages within an epistolary structure that continually returns to an acute awareness of physical mortality. I show that this structural pattern also imprints on the endings of the poems Keats wrote while nursing and mourning Tom, especially The Eve of St. Agnes (1819), ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (1819), and the revised fragment of the Hyperion project (1818–19). I argue that Tom’s body emerges at the end of Keats’s literary productions because physical suffering is what causes metaphysical and romantic fantasy – and even communication itself – to falter. However, Tom’s suffering is also, paradoxically, what motivates Keats’s to write in the first place – it is the origin of his poetic imagination and the conclusion of his poetic project.