Book Review: "Selected Letters" by John Keats

"Tis the most difficult thing in the world to me to write a letter. My stomach continues so bad, that I feel it worse on opening any book – yet I am much better than I was in Quarantine. Then I am afraid to encounter the proing and conning of any thing interesting to me in England. I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence"

John Keats is known as the last Romantic to be born and the first to die. During the early 1800s, John Keats was a rising star in the world of poetry, initially training and qualifying as a doctor but then moving into the land of verse and words. Let's all be perfectly honest as well, Keats is the one poet that everyone loves reading in the era. His poetry has a 'negative capability' and a resonance with a young soul that will never grow old. His words often showcase a whole breadth of emotions in a single line or verse, his tone is nearly always strong and filled with overwhelming feeling.

Whilst I was on my degree, I made it my business to study more of Keats poetry than I got during my secondary years. I read widely into the poet who wrote classics such as Bright Star and Ode to a Grecian Urn. When I was doing my undergraduate thesis, I decided it would be a great idea to run the poem La Belle Dame Sans Merci into the mix, trying to use it to supplement my studies into Dante's Divine Comedy, Boccaccio's Decameron and Petrarch's Canzoniere. Honestly, it worked out really well and I was surprised how naturally a poet like the young John Keats could fit amongst the Italian Renaissance masters. It really does go to show how talented he really was.

Beginning in 1816, shortly towards Keats' 21st birthday when he is about to receive some money from inheritance, we see a young Keats talk about his poetic ambitions and how much he respects the classic writers. Keats constantly refers back to William Shakespeare, quoting moments from Measure for Measure for example, looking into why we should be invested with the emotions of the lines. One thing we realise as readers is that even when writing prose, John Keats never fails to be poetic in his language. The most incredibly philosophical descriptions on emotion, poetry, imagery and love, Keats proves that he may be young but he is no lesser than people already established in his own generation.

"Poetry should be great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul and does not startle or amaze it with itself, but with its subject..."

- John Keats to JH Reynolds (1818)

There is a letter within this book that I have always found fascinating (no, unfortunately it is not the letter that features the quotation above, but instead one a couple of letters after it). It is a letter in which Keats discusses the importance of memory and preservation of beautiful images in the mind. There seems to him a philosophy in which we can recall things we have felt in order to be written on the page and thus, we can experience the emotion in a sort of half-life again. He also states that memory has nothing to do with knowledge because those who sometimes have the most vivid memories may not always be the ones who have the greatest knowledge. Two people experiencing the same journey may look back on it with different memories purely because of the emotions that they have correlated those memories with. It's one of those that seriously gets you thinking about Keats' own work and life.

We then have letters whilst John Keats is taking care of his brother, Tom - who is suffering from tuberculosis (the very illness that will take the life of the poet some years on). He describes the wavering of the illness in which Tom appears to be getting better and then, does not. Tom's violent vomiting of blood and weakness make Keats extremely worried and even when Keats takes a walk upon the far north, he cannot help but write to his brother, beseeching him to write back - keeping in thorough touch and wanting him to be alright.

He barely writes anything of his brother's actual death, but to his sister there is a letter of a few lines in which he explains that he had been holding back some news because of how close the two were. Instead of stating to her that he has died, he instead tries to prepare her for the worst by stating that Tom's condition has become basically incurable and that waiting for death is now all they can do. However, this was probably written before Tom actually died and reached his sister only shortly afterwards. I think the fact that there is barely anything written about Tom's death shows us this really sombre tone through absence. We can tell Keats is beside himself with grief because of how little he says about it.

By 1820, we can see that Keats is unwell and has a fever that keeps returning to him. We know that by 1821, Keats is dead and so, reading these letters of 1820 are really concerning - we know he yet does not know what is happening entirely and when he does find out, he knows he must die. Keats' final letter ends with 'I always made an awkward bow' and from this, we are now completely aware that he knows he will not survive the next few months.

John Keats died in his doctors arms on the 23rd of February, 1821 - aged only twenty-five. He is buried in the protestant cemetery in Rome with a grave inscription that reads: Here lies One Whose Name was writ in water.

John Keats is a fascinating figure and if you love his poetry then to learn more about him, the Selected Letters is basically unmissable. Not just about his character though, we can see the different ways in which Keats speaks with different people. His siblings, his publishers, Shelley, his girlfriend and so many other people. He was truly and completely one of a kind in his era and beyond.