MLR, I02.1, 2007 2I5 Keats's final days and weeks gradually emerged. Severn became known as the only friend ofKeats thatwas prepared to travelwith him and nurse him as he died. And as the century progressed, Severn increasingly became 'a kind of livingmonument to his friend', as Grant F Scott puts it (p. 57)-in his care forKeats's grave, inhis repeated return in his paintings toKeatsian subjects, and in his sheer presence in Rome, the citywhere he devotedly nursed Keats in his last illness. But Severn was also a reasonably successful painter in his own right, and was laterBritish Consul inRome, living on almost sixty years after the death ofKeats (he died inRome in I879 at the age of eighty-six), and one of the facts thatScott's book makes clear is the extent towhich Severn was not preoccupied by Keats in later life.Scott's superbly researched and annotated edition, then, constitutes an important record of the final days and posthumous lifeof JohnKeats and at the same time a fascinating case study in the career of aminor and now forgottenVictorian painter. While most of the letters concerning the last days ofKeats have previously been published in reasonably accurate form (byHyder Edward Rollins in The Letters of JohnKeats, I814-I82I, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, I958) and in his The Keats Circle: Letters and Papers, I8I6-I878 (Cambridge, MA: Har vard University Press, I948), and elsewhere), only about a quarter of the 178 letters printed here have previously appeared in print at all. Scott's volume consists of a thorough biographical introduction, a detailed chronology, selected annotated letters from the years I820 to I879 (including a selection from a substantial haul of letters owned by Sheila Birkenhead's daughter and 'rediscovered' by Scott), and substantial selections from the six sets of unpublished memoirs that Severn composed during his life, including an earlier draft of his only significant published work, 'On The Vicissitudes ofKeats's Fame'. The letters and memoirs, accompanied by Scott's detailed and accurate introduc tion and footnotes, allow for amajor reassessment of Severn and his place both in Victorian cultural history and in thehistory of the reception ofKeats. We now have a detailed account of the great blank in his life-the twenty years that he spent in England from I84I to I86o, ofwhich Sharp claimed that 'there is little to chronicle' (quoted p. 35)-and amuch fullerunderstanding not only ofSevern's place inKeats's lifeand finaldays but ofKeats's place inSevern's lifeand, indirectly,Keats's place in the lifeofVictorian culture. UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL ANDREW BENNETT Memoranda during the War. ByWALT WHITMAN. Ed. by PETER COVIELLO. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2004. liv+ I76 pp. ? I4.99. ISBN 978-o-I9-5I6793 I. The Civil War was a decisive turning-point in Whitman's career.On seeing his brother George's name listed among thecasualties of theBattle ofFredericksburg, he left New York for Virginia inDecember I862 to look forhim.What he encountered there,and in the field hospitals in and around Washington, over the next three years was to change his life and work. Memoranda during the War is Whitman's account of the devastation of thewar as hewitnessed it,of his tenderministrations to thewounded of both sides, and of his efforts to reconceive his democratic hopes forAmerica in the lightof theCivil War. Though firstpublished only in I876,Memoranda is a book that is gripped by the immediacy and horror ofWhitman's experience of thewar, working, as he described himself, as a 'Soldier's Missionary toHospital, Camp, and Battle Ground'. What is remarkable about Memoranda is that amidst its details of disease, death, and stoically borne suffering, Whitman manages to thread a narrative of hope in the 2i6 Reviews American future.From his shocked description of encountering a 'heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, &.c, a full load for a one-horse cart' (p. 8) on his firstarrival at Fredericksburg, to his closing summing up of 'the dead, the dead, the dead [. .J all unknown' (pp. 102-03) of thewar,Whitman always clings onto his conviction that these sacrificed bodies, nurturingAmerica's real soil,will also feed its metaphoric soil, becoming united inAmerica's...