Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph

KEATS: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph by Lucasta Miller brilliantly highlights John Keats’ fleeting life (1795 to 1821) through insightful analyses of his best poems, untangling what she calls his “vertiginous originality.” Miller, an esteemed British literary critic and author, sparkles as she illuminates the beauty of Keats’ highly original artistry, which incorporates boundary-breaking images that melt into one another. This typically Keatsian synesthesia intermingles discrete ideas with such elastic ease that negatives and positives co-exist in a shimmering interaction, particularly throughout his masterpiece, “Ode to a Nightingale.” It is as if the words just came to his teeming brain, unimpeded by conventional filters.

Why should anesthesiologists be interested in a book about a dead English poet? I would suggest four durable reasons, in no particular order. First, Keats was an extraordinary poet whose beautiful compositions speak to us beyond the moment and across time. Reading his thoughts is an enriching experience, regardless of one’s day job. Second, his life is inspirational when one learns of the formidable challenges he faced and the resilience and determination he displayed in overcoming these obstacles. Next, he trained in medicine for 8 yr before, somewhat reluctantly, abandoning medicine to focus on writing poetry. His clinical experiences shaped—and sharpened—his understanding of the human condition. Finally, as the storied anesthesiologist Emmanuel Papper, M.D., hypothesized in his 1995 book titled Romance, Poetry, and Surgical Sleep: Literature Influences Medicine,¹  Romantic era (circa 1795 to 1850) poets contributed to evolving social attitudes toward pain and suffering that accelerated the acceptance of surgical anesthesia as a positive development rather than a thwarting of divine will. Papper’s doctoral dissertation in English literature, published when he was 75, pondered the question of why it took until the 1840s for anesthesia to be “discovered,” since potions that induced sleep were known from antiquity, Valerius Cordus synthesized ether in 1540, and Joseph Priestley developed nitrous oxide in 1772. Although Lucasta Miller does not explore the possible connection between the Romantic poets and society’s willingness to accept surgical anesthesia, Dr. Papper’s thesis is an intriguing one. Whereas the ancient Greeks believed pain was an ennobling gift of the gods and the Judeo-Christian tradition viewed suffering as divine retribution or as a road to salvation, the Romantic poets—especially Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 to 1834) and Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 to 1822)—were preoccupied with the metaphysics of pain, as well as the worth of the individual. Pain then came to be considered a purposeless evil that was antithetical to human welfare. In other words, anesthesia was developed once society was ready to receive it.

Keats was an English poet of the second generation of Romantic poets, along with the aristocratic Lord Byron (1788 to 1824) and the upper-class Shelley, while Coleridge and William Wordsworth (1770 to 1850) represented the first generation of Romantic poets. When Keats died of tuberculosis at the age of 25, his poems had been in publication for less than 4 yr and had been received without enthusiasm. After his death, however, his fame burgeoned. By the end of the 19th century, Keats was firmly entrenched in the canon of English literature.

Keats’ middle-class background was decidedly not an asset to career advancement in early 19th century England. Unable to afford the “grand tour” as a youth, he did not travel beyond the British Isles until a journey to Rome was necessitated by his terminal illness. Keats’ breakthrough poem, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” is my personal favorite since its transcendent message about the potential of reading to inspire creative and expansive thought resonates with educators and students alike. In this magnificent sonnet, Keats describes the new horizons that opened to him when he first encountered Homer’s Greek epics in the translations of George Chapman, a contemporary of Shakespeare and the first person to translate the entire Iliad and Odyssey into English verse. Unfortunately, however, many of Keats’ contemporaries viewed him condescendingly since, although he was well versed in Latin and French, he did not have the privilege of studying Greek, which was an important component of expensive public-school education. Although Keats’ parents wished to send their sons to Eton or Harrow, they were not in a financial position to do so. Hence, Keats had to rely on translation to gain exposure to Greek classics. This, in combination with his lack of sophisticated travels, led some of his colleagues (including Lord Byron) to ridicule him behind his back. Indeed, Keats had been publicly humiliated for his insufficient “learning” in a literary journal of the era, which dismissed him for knowing Homer only from Chapman. Lucasta Miller reminds us that the grammar school–educated Shakespeare had been similarly criticized by his contemporary Ben Jonson for knowing “small Latin and less Greek.”

In fact, Keats’ inability to afford a public-school education ultimately benefitted him enormously. From the age of 8 yr, he studied as a boarder at Clarke’s Academy in Enfield, an excellent progressive school that offered unparalleled opportunities for intellectual development in a compassionate and open-minded environment. The inspirational and charismatic headmaster, John Clarke, and his son, Charles Cowden Clarke, effectively mentored and nurtured Keats, enabling him to cope with a devastating series of events.

When Keats was 8 yr of age, a life of frequent bereavement and instability began. His father sustained a fatal injury when he fell from his horse on his way home from visiting his young sons at school. His mother then quickly remarried and abandoned her four children to the care of their grandparents and the Clarkes. When she eventually resurfaced 6 yr later, Keats’ mother was divorced, alcoholic, and seriously ill with tuberculosis. Rather than displaying resentment toward his prodigal mother, Keats was devoted to her, administering her medications, cooking her food, and reading to her until her death 4 months later.

In Keats’ youth, medicine was not yet a university subject and was taught by training on the job. Impressed with the skill and compassion Keats displayed in caring for his mother, Keats’ mentors concluded that medicine would be a wise career for him to pursue. At the age of 14, he left school to be apprenticed to an apothecary, Thomas Hammond, the family physician who had attended Keats’ own mother during her final illness. In October 1815, having completed his 5-yr apprenticeship, Keats registered as a medical student at Guy’s Hospital in London. Within a month, his distinct aptitude for medicine was recognized with a significant promotion to the equivalent of a junior house surgeon today. In 1816, Keats received his apothecary’s license, which made him eligible to practice as an apothecary, physician, and surgeon. Nonetheless, in the spring of 1817, after much soul-searching, Keats resolved to be a poet, not a surgeon.

In 1818, tragedy struck again when one of Keats’ younger brothers, Tom, developed tuberculosis. True to form, Keats lovingly nursed Tom until his early death in December 1818. It has been widely conjectured that this experience infected John Keats with the bacillus that killed him less than 3 yr later. Although Keats’ literary output was prodigious in 1819, his health deteriorated, and by early 1820, he displayed increasingly serious symptoms of tuberculosis. When he first expectorated bright red blood, Keats remarked, “That drop of blood is my death warrant. I must die.” At the suggestion of his physicians, he agreed to move to Italy for its more salubrious climate, accompanied by his devoted friend, the artist Joseph Severn. Keats’ last days were excruciating; he would sometimes cry upon awakening to find himself still alive.

John Keats died in Rome on February 23, 1821, and was buried in the city’s non-Catholic cemetery (Cimitero Acattolico). His last request was to be placed under a tombstone bearing no name or date, only the words he wrote for his own epitaph 1 week before his death, “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.” Apparently, Keats mistakenly thought his legacy would fade into nothingness, unremembered. Rather, he is commemorated today in Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey above a statue of Shakespeare.

Seven weeks after Keats’ funeral, Shelley memorialized him in his poem “Adonais.” After Shelley drowned a year later, his ashes were buried in the same Roman cemetery where Keats was entombed. Designed by Severn, Keats’ gravestone features an image of a Grecian lyre half-strung to represent a life half-lived. For the remainder of his life, Severn was haunted by the memory of Keats’ suffering and, decades later, was interred next to Keats.

Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph movingly captures the poet’s short but intense life in all its humanity and lucidly explicates his luminous writing. The book deserves a wide audience, including physicians. Readers will come away from this engaging and accessible biography understanding why John Keats mattered. After all, “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.”²