John Keats by Joseph Severn: On Likeness and Life-writing

Joseph Severn’s first posthumous portrait of John Keats stands in a complex relation to the quality of likeness in biographical representation. Severn pictures Keats as an absorbed reader, whose unawareness of observation is and is not like his final obliviousness in death. A comparable scene recurs in memoirs of Keats by other friends, and likewise in his letters, in an imaginative movement that is both essentially fanciful and oriented towards the truth of a remembered relation. Severn tell us that his portrait recollects the last time he saw Keats looking ‘like himself ’, and this essay argues that comfortable, habitual unconsciousness is the foundation of this type of likeness too.