Sad Times

I'm approaching the end of Andrew Motion's Keats with the now clearly consumptive poet making plans for the final journey to Italy. If anyone has vaguely 'romantic' ideas of what it meant to suffer from consumption in the early nineteenth century this biography will (ironically) cure them. I was startled to read about the common assumptions in the period about the condition, which help to explain, to some degree, why Keats was so long in denial about it.

The segments about JK's final dealings with his younger brother George also make for extraordinarily melancholy reading. In fact, the brief account of George's career in America up to his death in early middle age is, in a curious way, one of the most compelling parts of the book. A reminder of other lives and their triumphs and defeats and despairs.

Motion somehow manages to get inside the poet, or at least give you a sense of what that extraordinary interior was like, the way his mercurial mind worked, in a way that profoundly alters the way you read the poems. He also convinces you, though I'm not sure this was his intention, of just how straightforwardly likable as a person JK was. I suppose this has something to do with his many vulnerabilities. It's striking just how many friends he had and how important those friendships were to him.

A sad book, then. But life-enhancing in its way.