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Susan Eilenberg · Hooted from the Stage: Living with Keats lrb.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from lrb.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Wanted in Rome 23 Feb, 2021 Mary Wilsey This is a tale of two young men who travelled to Rome and took up lodgings in Piazza di Spagna. One of them had tuberculosis and thought a winter in Rome might give him a longer lease on life. The other was there to accompany his sick friend but he also made the trip from London because he thought it would benefit his career as an artist and win him a Royal Academy scholarship. They arrived in Rome in mid-November 1820 after a long journey by sea from London to Naples and then overland to Rome. Just over three months later, on 23 February 1821, John Keats died in a small room on the second floor of Piazza di Spagna 26 with only his friend Joseph Severn at his side. He was just 25. It was a difficult and lonely death. ....
Joseph Severn s c1845 painting of Keats on Hampstead Heath Credit: Granger/Alamy “Cabin’d, cribb’d, confined” is how Macbeth describes being mentally shut-in when his plans fail. It is how John Keats, too, must have felt when making his final journey on a small ship to Italy in 1820, and then being quarantined on board in Naples harbour for 10 days in November that year. (At least Keats’s incarceration was for only a week and three days. Our collective quarantine is rather longer than that, with no clear end in sight.) A few months later, on February 23 two hundred years ago, the poet would die in Rome. He was only 25 years old. ....