One gets a clear sense of the direction of Denise Gigante’s new book The Keats Brothers from its subtitle: The Life of John and George. That use of the singular (“life” as opposed to “lives”) is itself an argument against the standard telling of John’s life, in which George is usually cast as a mere bit player, or, worse, something of a villain. With The Keats Brothers, though, Gigante sets out to give us an understanding of a relationship that was absolutely central to John, and to the composition of some of his finest poems. In this weekend’s New York Times Book Review, Christopher Benfey commends Gigante for succeeding “brilliantly.”
George Keats, two years younger than John, was swept up by the emigration fever of 1818, when many ambitious young men left England. Gigante writes of this as a moment when the modern world was coming into being, with the industrial revolution and capitalization propelling a complete reshaping of society. It was John who helped to answer the question of the role of the poet in this new modern society, and it was the entrepreneurial George who was his closest link to it, as he made his way in the U.S. Gigante’s account recreates George’s adventures, and her presentation of the rich correspondence between the brothers shows that their relationship withstood George’s absence.
In addition to being a lively story of the 19th century, The Keats Brothers is an important contribution to our appreciation of John’s poetry. As Gigante explains in an episode of the HUP Podcast (listen here), understanding the relationship between Keats and his brothers helps us to understand the haunting quality of some of the poems for which John is best remembered. His well-known odes, written with such pace in 1819, are colored by John’s sorrow over the new distance between him and George, and also by the recent death of their youngest brother Tom. The new perspective that Gigante offers here also helps readers to grasp the transatlantic context of John’s writing.
When John died of tuberculosis and a severe pulmonary hemorrhage in 1821, at just twenty-five, George had just been back in England seeking more capital for his American ventures. He’d returned to the U.S. and didn’t learn of John’s demise until months later. John’s death is often projected onto George, and his absence at John’s end is cast as abandonment, but Gigante shows that George’s emigration had been inspired by his desire to provide for his siblings, who’d been orphaned young. Throughout The Keats Brothers, she works to show that George was far from a scoundrel, and that his life was as emblematic of the time as John’s:
However much it might jar with the traditional version of the story to suggest, the Cockney Pioneer deserves a place next to the Cockney Poet in the visionary company of Romanticism. While the medium of their dreams may have differed, the two eldest Keats brothers—“Man of Genius” and “Man of Power”—embodied sibling forms of the phenomenon we call Romanticism.
That bit comes from Gigante’s Prologue, where she invites her readers for an adventure on which they’ll join generations in trying to see the world through the eyes of John Keats.