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Author Gigante, Denise, 1965-

Title The Keats brothers : the life of John and George / Denise Gigante
Published Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011

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Description 1 online resource (ix, 499 pages, 40 unnumbered pages of plates) : illustrations, maps, portraits
Contents pt. 1. 1816-1817 and before -- pt. 2. 1818 -- pt. 3. 1819 -- pt. 4. 1820-1841 and after
Summary John and George Keats--Man of Genius and Man of Power, to use John's words--embodied sibling forms of the phenomenon we call Romanticism. George's 1818 move to the western frontier of the United States, an imaginative leap across four thousand miles onto the tabula rasa of the American dream, created in John an abysm of alienation and loneliness that would inspire the poet's most plangent and sublime poetry. Denise Gigante's account of this emigration places John's life and work in a transatlantic context that has eluded his previous biographers, while revealing the emotional turmoil at the heart of some of the most lasting verse in English. In most accounts of John's life, George plays a small role. He is often depicted as a scoundrel who left his brother destitute and dying to pursue his own fortune in America. But as Gigante shows, George ventured into a land of prairie fires, flat-bottomed riverboats, wildcats, and bears in part to save his brothers, John and Tom, from financial ruin. There was a vital bond between the brothers, evident in John's letters to his brother and sister-in-law, Georgina, in Louisville, Kentucky, which run to thousands of words and detail his thoughts about the nature of poetry, the human condition, and the soul. Gigante demonstrates that John's 1819 Odes and Hyperion fragments emerged from his profound grief following George's departure and Tom's death--and that we owe these great works of English Romanticism in part to the deep, lasting fraternal friendship that Gigante reveals in these pages
John and George Keats--Man of Genius and Man of Power--embodied sibling forms of Romanticism. George's emigration to the U.S. frontier created an abysm of loneliness and alienation in John that would inspire his most plangent and sublime poetry. Gigante's account places John's life in a transatlantic context that has eluded his previous biographers
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Print version record
Subject Keats, John, 1795-1821
Keats, John, 1795-1821 -- Family
Keats, George, 1797-1841.
Keats, George, 1797-1841 -- Homes and haunts -- United States
SUBJECT Keats, George, 1797-1841 fast
Keats, John, 1795-1821 fast
Subject Poets, English -- 19th century -- Biography
English -- United States -- Biography
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY -- Literary.
POETRY -- English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh.
English
Families
Homes
Poets, English
United States
Genre/Form Biographies
Biographies.
Biographies.
Form Electronic book
ISBN 0674062728
9780674062726