Book Description

John and George KeatsÑMan of Genius and Man of Power, to use JohnÕs wordsÑembodied sibling forms of the phenomenon we call Romanticism. GeorgeÕs 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 poetÕs most plangent and sublime poetry. Denise GiganteÕs account of this emigration places JohnÕs 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 JohnÕs 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 JohnÕs 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 JohnÕs 1819 Odes and Hyperion fragments emerged from his profound grief following GeorgeÕs departure and TomÕs deathÑand that we owe these great works of English Romanticism in part to the deep, lasting fraternal friendship that Gigante reveals in these pages.