The Keats Brothers: The Life of John and George by Denise Gigante (review)

After a fast of fifteen years following Andrew Motion’s biography of Keats, we now find ourselves feasting on a trio of important biographies. Together with Nicholas Roe’s life of the poet and Lawrence Crutcher’s recently published biography of George Keats, Denise Gigante’s book offers us a sumptuous banquet. In presenting a lucid and engaging double portrait of John and George, moreover, its approach is refreshingly innovative, departing from the single-focus tome that has dominated Keats studies over the years and providing a welcome new perspective. As we know, Keats and his poetry have been examined from a variety of cultural, historical, and political vantage points, but not until now have they been so richly considered within the personal context of his own family and his close circle of friends. Whatever its minor flaws, this book enriches our knowledge of Keats’s vital ties with his siblings and situates his career in a valuable transatlantic context. Gigante follows George and Georgiana to America in 1818 and counterpoints their own epic journey with John’s evolving poetry and his experience of human suffering.

While it is debatable whether George Keats “deserves a place next to the Cockney Poet in the visionary company of Romanticism” (p. 7) and whether his voyage to America constituted a “visionary quest” (p. 162), his eventful story certainly merits telling. And its importance is only magnified when placed alongside his brothers’ lives. This is a tale not only of “fraternal affection” (p. 2) but also of “the consolations of fraternity” (p. 97). As orphans the Keats brothers found solace in their familial bond, traveling together, enjoying the bachelor recreations of London (“billiards, boxing, and bearbaiting” [p. 28]) and helping each other with their financial hardships and guardian Richard Abbey. Many of John’s early experiments with epistolary verse, as Gigante shows, derive from his relationship with George, and when his brother emigrated, his absence spurred the lengthy journal letters to America that contain some of the poet’s most profound aesthetic and philosophical insights. Gigante’s thesis is that John’s “most sublime verse … emerged from an abyss of loss and loneliness that opened in the wake of George’s emigration and, a few months later, of Tom’s death” (p. 2). In particular, she reads the Great Odes and the Hyperion fragments as embodying John’s complex emotional response to these traumatic events.

The book is as much a social and familial biography as it is a biography of place, of important territories and states that opened up west of the Allegheny Mountains in the 1820s and 30s. The early pages are organized by the brothers’ meetings with key figures like Leigh Hunt and Cadman Hodgkinson, but once we get to America, “the Land of Cockaigne” as the Cockney Pioneers brand it (p. 114), the book tarries along the route of George and Georgiana’s stage coach journey to document the histories of emerging cities and towns. In turn, Philadelphia (p. 182ff), Chambersburg (p. 199ff), Pittsburgh (p. 206ff), Cincinnati (p. 250ff), Harmony, Indiana (p. 279ff), and Louisville, Kentucky (p. 344ff), where they finally settle, all receive substantial treatment. The book is steeped in cartography, geography, and topography—a litany of terrains. At one point we learn just how many options George had available to him when it came to selecting a river craft to pilot down the Ohio River, from flatboats to what were called “arks” (p. 229). Gleaned from travel narratives by figures as diverse as Charles Dickens and Henry Bradshaw Fearon, this section of the book paints a vivid picture of the kind of material reality encountered by the couple, a reality superbly amplified in its raw alien force by juxtaposition with the conventional civilities of London. We move with the Keatses through the “wealth and filth” of Pittsburgh (p. 208), stop to witness a “squirrel frolic” (p. 229), and cringe in...