“Love is my religion I could die for that”: the bicentenary of the death of English poet John Keats (1795–1821)
On February 21, 1821, the 25-year-old English poet John Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome. To mark the bicentenary, the British School at Rome streamed a production of Pelé Cox’s 2014 play
Lift Me Up, I Am Dying about the poet’s last weeks, as he was tended to by the artist Joseph Severn.
Posthumous portrait of John Keats by William Hilton. National Portrait Gallery, London
The play was first produced at Rome’s Keats-Shelley museum, located in the house near the Spanish Steps where Keats died. When a proposed anniversary performance was cancelled because of the pandemic, Cox redrafted it as a short film. The actors filmed themselves in lockdown, with Cox, Art Director Fabio Barry and Assistant Director/Editor Thomas Painter editing the footage together for streaming at the time of the anniversary.
Mahir Ali
THE headstone above a final resting place dug in Rome’s non-Catholic cemetery 200 years ago today bears the indelible inscription: “This grave contains all that was mortal of a young English poet who, on his death bed, in the bitterness of his heart at the malicious power of his enemies, desired these words to be engraven on his tomb stone: ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water’.”
There is a harp above the inscription, but no name. As some readers might have guessed, the mortal remains are those of John Keats, the bicentenary of whose distressingly premature demise was commemorated yesterday with readings, lectures, virtual tours and the like. His immortal remains can be found in bookshelves all around the world.
How Keats lives on His radical depictions of desire and oblivion changed the course of English poetry – and, 200 years after his death, they disarm us still. As Jonathan Bate observes, the American critic Edmund Wilson “never allowed his friendship to dull his critical intelligence”. He had been close to F Scott Fitzgerald as a student, but, writing in 1924 about Fitzgerald’s first novel,
This Side of Paradise, he was unforgiving towards what he saw as its central weaknesses – a lack of energy and coherence, which he attributed to the intertwining malign influences of Compton Mackenzie and John Keats. Mackenzie, whose stock as a novelist was still high in the 1920s, had himself attributed features of his florid literary style to Keats’s example; but Fitzgerald had certainly gone direct to the source as well.
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