Writing Keats's Last Days: Severn, Sharp, and Romantic Biography

Abstract

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 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 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 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 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 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 story about the etiquette of dying well. (4) It is curious that tale with such powerful currency depends on 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 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 detailed record of Keats's decline and then returned to the subject in series of memoirs written at various points over the course of his long life. As it turns out, many of the most famous anecdotes from this time derive not from Severn's contemporary letters and journal-letters of 1820-21, which have been faithfully reproduced in Hyder Rollins' The Keats Circle, (6) but from his later reminiscences. These have come down to us through William Sharp, Severn's first and most influential biographer, whose Life and Letters of Joseph Severn (1892) has remained an invaluable sourcebook for Keats biographers and literary historians. (7) While modern biographers of Keats have consulted Rollins for Severn's letters of the time, they have always relied on Sharp's book for the later accounts, partly because it is so highly readable, but primarily because Sharp had access to what he termed a great mass of letters, journals, reminiscences, and fragmentary records (v) which were entrusted to him in the late 1880s by Joseph's eldest son Walter. Since much of this material was scattered and presumed lost shortly after Sharp finished his biography, his book became the only source for these records. (8) The rediscovery of large portion of the Severn papers in 1972 did nothing to alter this landscape, mostly because they surfaced with such little fanfare and because they arrived just after the great wave of Keats biographies had crested (Ward and Bate published their biographies in 1963, Gittings in 1968). Because these papers are still so little known--they are currently in an accessions file at the Houghton library and have not yet been officially catalogued--no one has actually compared Severn's manuscripts against Sharp's transcripts. …