The Keats Brothers: The life of John and George
New York Times Notable Book for 2011 and Editor’s Choice, The New York Times Book Review
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 and 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.
About the Author
Denise Gigante teaches British poetry with a concentration in the Romantic period. She is the author, most recently, of Book Madness: A Story of Book Collectors in America (Yale University Press, 2023), a study of the dispersal of Charles Lamb’s library in the mid-nineteenth century. It former is available in Audible Books and is currently being translated into Chinese and Arabic. Her most recent edited book is The Cambridge History of the British Essay (2024), the first authoritative single-volume history of the essay form's development within the British literary tradition. It includes her “Preface to a History in the Form of an Essay” and her chapter on “The Bibliographical Essay.”
She is also the author of The Keats Brothers: The Life of John and George, (Harvard UP, 2011), which was a New York Times Notable Book and Editor’s Choice for 2011; Life: Organic Form and Romanticism (Yale UP, 2009), Taste: A Literary History (Yale UP, 2005), and two anthologies: The Great Age of the English Essay (Yale UP, 2008) and Gusto: Essential Writings in Nineteenth-Century Gastronomy (Routledge, 2005). Her scholarly articles and book chapters range across the topics of taste, aesthetics, and poetic form.
She is currently completing work on The Mental Traveller: William Blake. The book grows out of her Clarendon Lectures at Oxford University (2020) and will be published by Oxford University Press. It is a study of Blake’s illuminated poetry in the context of Christian artwork from the late twelfth through the early sixteenth century. It is concerned with the nature of salvation history set against the radical, mystical, and revolutionary energies of Catholicism as developed on the Italian peninsula—and as expressed allegorically, symbolically, and schematically or diagrammatically.