Mapping Keats’s Progress
A Critical Chronology

Piazza di Spagna, Rome (1800 map)

Keats arrives in Rome at 15 November, having taken a carriage from Naples a week earlier. He initially lands by sea at Naples, 21 October, only to be quarantined on his ship for ten days. Keats is accompanied by his friend, the young painter Joseph Severn, who voyages with Keats from London, beginning 17 September. In Rome, Keats and Severn stay at a second-floor​ apartment at 26 Piazza di Spagna (which is now Keats-Shelley House, a museum dedicated mainly to Keats, Percy Shelley, and their circles). Severn, feeling helpless but trying his best to help Keats, records that Keats arrives in Naples with a shattered frame—and broken heart (letters, 1, 2 Nov).

Keats’s state is indeed horrible, though Keats attempts to muster both personal fortitude and philosophical distancing: to Brown he writes, I will endeavor to bear my miseries patiently [. . .] It surprised me that the human heart is capable of containing and bearing so much misery (letters, 1 Nov). This is as much a personal statement as a confirmation of what Keats, very deliberately, attempts to address in his best poetry. Even at this desperate moment, the statement clearly, but naturally, draws upon Keats’s complex engagement with the poetic depths of William Wordsworth’s greatest poetry, which is centered in the human heart and bears what Wordsworth calls the burden of the mystery (from Wordsworth’s poem that Keats knows so well, Tintern Abbey, with the phrase human heart being pulled from another poem by Wordsworth that Keats knows equally well, The Intimations [Immortality] Ode).

Keats travels to Italy with the vague hope of reversing his rapidly failing health. Despite the haphazard medical diagnosis that he might have some digestive issues (and earlier diagnosis that he suffers from extreme anxiety only), to be remedied by fresh air and exercise (including horseback riding!), Keats clearly suffers from consumption—pulmonary tuberculosis—that has recently spread from his lungs to his stomach. Keats has had a fever for months, indicating gross, systemic infection. Given Keats’s own medical training, his long-standing issues with coughing/chronic throat difficulties, witnessing the deaths of younger brother and mother from consumption, and blood-spitting that began about nine months earlier, Keats is himself too aware of his condition.

From Naples on 1 November, Keats writes to Charles Brown, who is his best friend, former roommate, travelling companion, financial supporter, and the person with whom he intended to travel to Italy. Misery, regret, despair, and utter helplessness intermix with great passion and longing. Keats confides his regrets to Brown, that his relationship with Fanny Brawne, to whom he was betrothed, was never consummated: My dear Brown, Keats writes, I should have had her when I was in health, and I should have remained well. I can bear to die—I cannot bear to leave her. Oh, God! God! God! Keats says that he vividly imagines Fanny, but in doing so, he can only describe it in metaphors of acute pain—of being pierced and scalded, with feelings of coals of fire in my breast.

On 8 November, from Louisville, Kentucky, Keats’s brother George writes that his thoughts are with Keats: Your inevitable distresses are subject to conversation to us [him and his wife, Georgiana] almost every day . . .. In the meantime, George tells Keats about his efforts to keep his business venture going—George Keats & Company. But George’s goal to make money in America and then return to England is never achieved; part of his hope was to help out Keats. George will himself die of consumption in 1841, though he will eventually have some business success in Kentucky. His decision to remain in the US is likely based to some degree on the cruel fact that he’s lost both of his brothers.

Subtly, yet strikingly, Keats gives us a glimpse back into his mature poetics. It is, in a way, Keats’s final word about poetry. It briefly returns us to the moment when, about two years earlier, he crucially describes his own poetical Character—which anticipates what he achieves in the remarkable poetry to come in 1819. It is that famous (famous at least for us) moment when he describes writing not with the qualities of the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime but as a camelion Poet, one who lives in contrasts, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated. It enjoys, he writes, light and shade (letters, 27 Oct 1818). Now, two years later, on 30 November to Brown, and with thoughts of Fanny Brawne haunting and taunting him, and with a future frightfully darkened by an imminent and agonizing death, he recognizes that in his condition and situation there is material necessary for a poem: the knowledge of contrast, feeling for light and shade. But it is a poem he cannot write. What he profoundly calls his posthumous existence prevents him, and so, camelion-like, he can only disappear into anxious thoughts about the life he hoped he might have lived and into the uncertainty of what the future, might, if anything, give him.

This is the last letter from Keats we know of; he signs off with sad thoughts about his sister and brothers; and he adds, as a revealing but consistent gesture of his own character, I can scarcely bid you good bye even in a letter. I always made an awkward bow. / God bless you! / John Keats.

Keats’s own poetry of April 1819 can be brought to bear upon his struggle: How fever’d is the man who cannot look / Upon his mortal days with temperate blood . . . (On Fame [How fever’d is the man]). Keats, though extremely fevered, does, at this moment of farewell, summon a dignified and poetic expression of his own character and upon his diminishing mortal days.