By Denise Gigante
John and George Keats—Man of Genius and guy of energy, to take advantage of John’s words—embodied sibling different types of the phenomenon we name Romanticism. George’s 1818 circulation to the western frontier of the USA, an ingenious jump throughout 4 thousand miles onto the tabula rasa of the yankee dream, created in John an abysm of alienation and loneliness that might encourage the poet’s so much plangent and stylish poetry. Denise Gigante’s account of this emigration locations John’s existence and paintings in a transatlantic context that has eluded his earlier biographers, whereas revealing the emotional turmoil on the middle of a few of the longest enduring verse in English.
In such a lot bills of John’s existence, George performs a small position. he's frequently depicted as a scoundrel who left his brother destitute and demise to pursue his personal fortune in the US. yet as Gigante indicates, George ventured right into a land of prairie fires, flat-bottomed riverboats, wildcats, and bears partially to avoid wasting his brothers, John and Tom, from financial disaster. there has been an important bond among the brothers, obvious in John’s letters to his brother and sister-in-law, Georgina, in Louisville, Kentucky, which run to hundreds of thousands of phrases and element his ideas concerning the nature of poetry, the human situation, 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 those nice works of English Romanticism partly to the deep, lasting fraternal friendship that Gigante unearths in those pages.
