The Keats Brothers

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 an 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.

ISBN 0674048563   Pages 552 ISBN13 9780674048560 (What's this?)   Weight (grammes) 889 Publisher Harvard University Press   Published in Cambridge, Mass. Imprint The Belknap Press   Height (mm) 235 Format Hardback   Width (mm) 162 Publication date 14 Oct 2011   Spine width (mm) 34 DEWEY 821.7   Academic level General DEWEY edition DC22

[The Keats Brothers] takes a step beyond standard biographies in several ways. Most importantly, it explores the central role George played in recognizing and emotionally supporting John's genius. Publishers Weekly 20110829 [Gigante's] book, with its transatlantic sweep and epic narrative--including cameos from John James Audubon, Emerson, and more--offers a detailed study of the stunning vicissitudes of the brothers' lives. Even those familiar with the poet's timeline will see it anew through the lens of this intense sibling relationship...As she unravels the compelling story of John's and George's lives, Gigante easily overturns stereotypes about academics churning out dry prose. She has the descriptive power of a novelist or poet...The Keats Brothers is a major accomplishment, one that will surely influence biographies of Keats yet to come." -- Carmela Ciuraru Barnes & Noble Review 20111017 Gigante has had the clever idea of telling the stories of John and George as parallel lives, a dual biography of brothers. Of course, no single achievement of George's matches John's in any imaginable way...The challenge for Gigante is to give sufficiently rich detail concerning George's travels in America to outweigh the conspicuous achievement gap between the two brothers. Mostly, she succeeds brilliantly. The American wilderness, she points out, had long appealed to English poets, as a land of utopian social possibility and sublime natural imagery...Gigante memorably contrasts these imaginary worlds with the slovenly wilderness and grimy inhabitants that George and Georgiana witnessed as they traveled by barge and wagon into the interior...The book ends splendidly...with the apparition of Oscar Wilde, long after George's death by tuberculosis in 1841, lecturing on John Keats, "the real Adonis of our age," to the people of Louisville in 1882, and admiring Keats's manuscripts in the hands of his niece, Emma. -- Christopher Benfey New York Times Book Review 20111016 [Gigante's] book, with its transatlantic sweep and epic narrative--including cameos from John James Audubon, Emerson, and more--offers a detailed study of the stunning vicissitudes of the brothers' lives. Even those familiar with the poet's timeline will see it anew through the lens of this intense sibling relationship...As she unravels the compelling story of John's and George's lives, Gigante easily overturns stereotypes about academics churning out dry prose. She has the descriptive power of a novelist or poet...The Keats Brothers is a major accomplishment, one that will surely influence biographies of Keats yet to come. -- Carmela Ciuraru Barnes & Noble Review 20111017 Gigante has had the clever idea of telling the stories of John and George as parallel lives, a dual biography of brothers. Of course, no single achievement of George's matches John's in any imaginable way...The challenge for Gigante is to give sufficiently rich detail concerning George's travels in America to outweigh the conspicuous achievement gap between the two brothers. Mostly, she succeeds brilliantly. The American wilderness, she points out, had long appealed to English poets, as a land of utopian social possibility and sublime natural imagery...Gigante memorably contrasts these imaginary worlds with the slovenly wilderness and grimy inhabitants that George and Georgiana witnessed as they traveled by barge and wagon into the interior...The book ends splendidly...with the apparition of Oscar Wilde, long after George's death by tuberculosis in 1841, lecturing on John Keats, "the real Adonis of our age," to the people of Louisville in 1882, and admiring Keats's manuscripts in the hands of his niece, Emma. -- Christopher Benfey New York Times Book Review 20111016 There have been plenty of good biographies of Keats but Denise Gigante has had the bright idea of writing a dual biography intertwining the sad history of John with the much less well-known story of his brother George...Gigante examines their so

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