INTRODUCTION
Tracing the life and works not only of John Keats but also of his lesser-known brother, George, Clare Elliott, Michael Collins, Peter Riley and Ben Hickman debate Denise Gigante's recent volume, The Keats Brothers: The Life of John and George. Coming to grips not only with their fraternal relationship, these scholars engage in an in-depth intellectual conversation regarding transatlantic migration (especially as it relates to George Keats's removal to the United States), transcendentalism, melancholia, and chattel slavery. In a study of letters, biographical writing and imaginative poetic discourse in relation to transnational models of exchange, new light emerges not only upon the life and works of an iconic poet but upon the shifting relationship between British and American Romanticism.
Divided into four parts, Denise Gigante's biography of John Keats takes the reader on a somewhat overwhelming tour of the Keats siblings' lives from 1816, when John was quite ill, until after his death. The book's subtitle – The Life of John and George – invites the reader to regard Keats's bond with his brother George as cementing a common identity. What makes this more remarkable is that Gigante's undertaking is not only to write a new biography of Keats, a massive task in itself, but also rather to tell a story of transatlantic affinity, both between brothers and between nations. George, the brother who emigrated to the United States, is as integral to this idea as the famous sibling; his story, told by Gigante, is a parallel tale of the New World unfolding before adventuring eyes, of America under construction, of a wilderness often seemingly untouched. Their fraternal bond helps to build a case for reading John Keats's poetry within a transnational frame, partly illuminated by George and his wife Georgiana's time travelling through Ohio to Cincinnati and on to Louisville, which was brought to life in the transatlantic correspondence between the two men.
John and George were two of four Keats children. Having lost their parents early in life, Gigante reimagines the siblings clinging to one another with ties that were not only emotional but also deeply imaginative. Although Gigante does not make the comparison, this puts one in mind of the Brontë children engrossed together in a richly sustained world of invention. And like the Brontës, the other Keats children (George, Tom and Fanny) appear to have been responsible in some small way for the development of John's nascent imagination, perhaps even the origins of the capacity for empathy that he would famously identify as “negative capability.” If not quite that, then George certainly figures here as a brotherly muse for the poet.
Gigante's transatlantic account stresses Keats's rootedness in British Romanticism and his interest in its literary affinities in America. There is an interesting, if brief, connection with William Blake, another poet important in terms of transatlantic literary dialogue. In Part Two, Gigante draws on Blake's fascination with the American West to help contextualize George Keats's calling to the Ohio River Valley. Gigante quotes a passage from Blake's notebook where he writes about the “hirelings” (the commercial traders who contributed to the same inequality by which they were oppressed) on the “cheating banks of the Thames.” In response to these “hirelings” Blake writes about the capacity of the Ohio River, of all things, to “wash his stains from me” (114). Gigante places her Blake comparison alongside Shelley's interest in the United States and the second generation of Romantic poets, specifically Coleridge and Southey, who had planned to emigrate to Pennsylvania and begin their “Pantisocracy” in 1794. It may not have transpired (Coleridge and Southey never made it to the States, and neither did Blake), but the connection recalls just how significant the New World was to English poets who had no real plans to “light out for the territory,” as Huckleberry Finn would say. Blake's poetic fascination with the United States strengthens Gigante's premise that we should think about John Keats from a transatlantic perspective. Blake conjured up the New World as an imaginative realm where ideological struggles could take place, figuring it as a poetic testing ground where his vision of a democracy free from “mind-forg'd manacles” could exist, and his long poem of 1793, “America: A Prophecy,” does just that.
This Blake link helps to show how the experience of the Keats brothers resonated with larger transatlantic patterns of artistic and intellectual exchange, and justifies Gigante's North American account of an English poet who never crossed the pond. A significant transnational affinity between the Keats family and American writers can be noticed in other areas, too, such as around the issue of religious faith. Like Blake, a religious dissenter, the American Transcendentalists tended to reject orthodox Christian dogma in favour of freethinking Unitarianism. Indeed, Unitarian sages had emigrated to the New World as political and religious exiles. When Ralph Waldo Emerson made his 1832 European tour and visited his idol Coleridge, their respective faiths appeared to be a bone of contention between them: much to Emerson's disappointment, Coleridge seemed surly when he arrived and read a long note on the Trinity in the place of a more gracious welcome. Given Unitarianism's rejection of several conventional Protestant doctrines as well as of the Trinity, it is significant that George Keats and his wife both became converts to this unorthodox faith, as Gigante explains.
Where George shared the dissenting views and the faith of the American Transcendentalists, he also demonstrated their troubling apathy toward slavery and abolition. In fact, in the prologue Gigante upturns clear, if somewhat shocking, evidence that George himself owned slaves. Later in the biography we learn that at the time of his death he owned two female slaves valued at $400 and $250 and a male slave valued at $600. Gigante's research is thorough on this point, and it suggests that George hired slaves when he needed more labour. In a comparable way, the Transcendentalists had ambiguous attitudes toward slavery. This is most notable in Emerson, who was overtly racist for much of his career and uninterested in abolition until the 1860s, when he suddenly had a change of heart and began to support the cause of John Brown. Like them, George Keats took an ambivalent approach to the emotive subject. The builder of a sawmill in Louisville, he is somewhat forgiven by Gigante as being a man of his time (“the factories, ropewalks, and mills of Louisville all employed slaves”) and for being kind to Negroes; he was a “slaveholder who did not believe in slavery” (399). We are also told that he referred to his slaves as servants. Of course, whether or not George used a euphemism for slavery, treated his slaves “kindly” and secretly disagreed with the institution, the fact that he owned slaves makes him symptomatic of the confused democracy of the New World. George shared a Romantic interest in dissent and some New World values of democracy and freedom, yet, when the issue of slavery raised its ugly head, he seems to have parted company with English anti-slavery attitudes (particularly from Blake) in order to become an American of his time: critical of the theory but supportive of the practice.
George lost his fortune in the Panic of 1837 and the financial insecurity of his early years has often been blamed for inducing John's ill health, but Gigante is clear that George supported John as best he could and that their relationship was ultimately a positive and mutually influential one. In spite of John's connection to the United States, through George, there is very little scholarship on Keats and America. Richard Gravil's Romantic Dialogues: Anglo-American Continuities, 1776–1862 (2000) gives an impressive account of the intertextual exchange between the writers of the American Renaissance and British Romantic poets, but since then little has been published on Keats's transatlantic networks. Gigante's biography sheds new light on the poet's Anglo-American Romantic dialogues but also has much to say about sibling bonds, transatlantic crossings in the nineteenth century, the racism of the day, and more besides. The research is meticulously gathered and deployed, with almost no stone left unturned. Gigante works tirelessly through all the letters, exchanges and accounts of life in the New World. But, crucially, by positioning the John–George relationship at the centre of the story, we learn so much more, not only about Keats's poetry in a transnational context, but also about the man himself and about the gaps in our own critical assumptions. For the first time, then, this biography presents Keats not as a singular poetic genius but as a man recently bereaved and cut adrift from his beloved brother who built a new life in the United States. Above all, it leaves no doubt that a new transatlantic dimension should be added to the Keats we think we already know.
In an 1817 letter to his friend Benjamin Bailey, John Keats outlined his vision of a world divided between the domains of two dominant, Romantic, masculine types: “Men of Genius” and “Men of Power.” For Keats,
Men of Genius are great as certain ethereal Chemicals operating on the Mass of neutral intellect – [but] they have not any individuality, any determined Character … A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence … because he has no Identity – he is continually in for – and filling some other Body. (Gigante 138)
In this letter Keats explored a central tension within his Romantic thought between the twinned poles of action and reflection, but in drawing this distinction he also revealed his own deep sense of concern about the emotional damage he may sustain in giving himself wholly over to intellectual or creative labours. Like many educated men within the lower middle classes, Keats conceived of the apprenticeship in the trades from which he had fled as “character building.” Consequently, he remained conflicted about the worth of his own intellectual pursuits, which he and his friends often regarded as a major cause of his melancholia and his lifelong tendency towards a self-abnegating and a self-annihilating sentimentalism. This is not a new insight. Numerous biographies and monographs on John Keats and his work have noted the important meanings he attached to friendship and generosity.
Indeed, Keats's life may be understood as a case study of how social networks impact literary labour. During his short career, Keats was alternately damned and redeemed by his associations – a process Gigante describes in The Keats Brothers with considerable sympathy and flair. Early on, his friendship with the controversial editor Leigh Hunt alienated him from the esteem of the British literary establishment, while in his final days his relationships with Charles Armitage Brown, John Severn and Fanny Brawne consoled his troubled conscience. Before now, though, none have attempted to situate those social relations within the wider geographical purview considered under the auspices of a transnational scholarly paradigm. To do this, Denise Gigante's new biography turns to the relationship between John and his brother George, whose emigration to the USA in 1818 is presented as the defining moment in the poet's creative life. Gigante is fairly adamant in her assertion that John's relationship with George was the dominant force in shaping his imagination and that “the fraternal bond [as opposed to any other social relationship he may have had] comes to the rescue” (21) whenever he felt “vaporous” or depressed. In the years before George's emigration, Gigante argues, Keats was able to balance his “transcendent vision” with “human connection” and so remain “tether[ed] … to his own humanity” (14). Afterwards, the young poet, even as he began to attain the highest realms of romantic “Genius,” would become all too sensitive and prone to dangerous and destructive melancholia. “Such powers of universal sympathy,” writes Gigante, “took the poet places that George never went, but in George's case the battlements of a consistent persona were more intact” (138).
In The Keats Brothers, Gigante explores the structural tension between “Genius” and “Power” by means of connected biographies of the “fraternal souls” (148) John and George, who are assigned particular roles in the complex transatlantic drama of post-1812 Anglo-American relations. Indeed, Gigante is clear about her intention to add new dramatic intensity to the frequently rehearsed tragedy of Keats's life when early on she describes John as “ambitious as Caesar” and George as “without the irony Shakespeare's Mark Antony would have intended … an honorable man” (7). In the book, George comes to play the speculative, adventurous and mercantile Man of Power (as opposed to the self-centered rascal that Charles Brown and other Keats biographers such as Walter Jackson Bate believed him to be), leaving John behind in Britain to “fill” the increasingly sick, dependent and ethereal “Body” of the Romantic Man of Genius.
The distinction works remarkably well, for the most part, in elucidating the various skills and characteristics necessary for success in the brothers' two, decidedly different, labours. Indeed, at its heart The Keats Brothers is a book about work and status, and how the brothers' uncomfortable location within the English lower middle class forced them into the orbit of various schemes (migration, dodgy speculations) in order to survive the financial panics that beset the early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. The author is particularly impressive when describing how ill-prepared London life had left George, his pregnant wife Georgiana, and other British settlers for their journeys to America. Georgiana, the author notes, wore “a silk dress and parlor slippers in a keelboat down the Ohio River to the western frontier” (136). Observations such as this are never intended by the author to poke fun at her subjects, but are, rather, designed to highlight how little was known by English city-dwellers about the realities of American frontier life. The author describes how emigration required George to navigate treacherous stretches of river and trade with men “who stabbed at their meat in the taverns with knives as if they were still in the Dark Ages” (268); a far cry from the refined gentilities of London's cult of sensibility. By the same token, the author ably describes how John's life required navigating his own passage through the turbulent waters of hostile Tory criticism, declining health and depressions both emotional and economic.
Gigante does not abstain from packing her narrative with discursive asides about the importance of such things as parlour etiquette within the literary economies of Regency Britain, or bizarre popular recipes for seasickness medication. There is an intensity and drama to the writing that sets The Keats Brothers apart from the bevy of biographies of nineteenth-century literary figures that commonly fill bookshop display tables at Christmastime. At one point, the author even offers the reader a compelling sketch of the odd and intriguing entertainments of pioneer settlers, including “a macabre festivity known as the squirrel frolic” (229). It is in adding this texture to accounts of the brothers' lives that the book is most successful. Indeed, it is an immaculately researched and lush treatment of class, diaspora and affection in early nineteenth-century Anglo-American society, which succeeds admirably in bringing two remarkably different worlds into fascinating juxtaposition.
Since the story of John Keats's life is fairly well known, it is George Keats who is best served by this approach. His encounters – and occasional disputes – with such characters as John James Audubon (one of the more remarkable figures in American literary history) and the famous playwright and Cherokee rights activist John Howard Payne, even his vicarious relationships with cultural luminaries like R. W. Emerson and Margaret Fuller, provide future scholars with plenty of potential material to offer new readings of Keats's poetry in transatlantic context. The author periodically offers close readings of John's poems that account for this previously occluded US material, but the book never fully succeeds as literary criticism. Instead, it usefully leaves space for further work in this area. Gigante's heart really lies in her descriptions of the transformative and rejuvenating power of the American landscape for at least one wing of the Keats family.
What problems the book has lie in Gigante's decision to lean heavily upon the English poet's own distinction between “Men of Genius” and “Men of Power” in her treatment of John and George. The Keats Brothers often runs the risk of falling back upon the kinds of characterization that transnational literary criticism should seek to dispute. The implication that George's western adventure built a stronger “Character” than John's more intellectual society life is heavily marked by the influence of a US romantic nationalist mythology, in the light of which imperial expansion and physical labour came to be seen as prerequisites for the construction of an inviolate and purposeful masculinity. The author's treatment of the younger brother occasionally approaches the hagiographical. Even the fact that George eventually became a Kentucky slaveholder, albeit one who “may have fit the profile of a slaveholder who did not believe in slavery” (399), is dismissed with a troubling quotation from one Dr. Urban Epinitis Ewing testifying to his “kind treatment of the Negroes” (399). This poses fascinating questions that are left mostly unanswered. If George really was such a Romantic, visionary, “Man of Power,” who shared the Keats's congenital sympathy for all mankind and dazzling work ethic, why did he adopt “the peculiar institution”? Indeed, Gigante is very quick to refute the claims made by Charles Brown and some of Keats's earlier biographers that George was highly irresponsible in his approach both to his brothers and to his own young family. Gigante almost implies that when America beckoned in the shape of an investment opportunity in Morris Birkbeck's “English Prairie,” George Keats had to answer. The author does not dwell long, for example, on why George, knowing that his other brother Tom was approaching death and John was oddly unfit for profitable labour, quit his job in Richard Abbey's tea business: “One day, he plucked his hat off its hook and left the counting house, never to return” (59). His pride, it seems, was often dangerous.
A final point worth making here is that in pinning the origins of John Keats's poetic sympathy on his relationship with his brother, Gigante presents the poet's imagination as far less expansive and inclusive than critics such as Harold Bloom have done. A peculiar effect of the approach taken by the author in The Keats Brothers is to expand the connections made in Keats's work along a spatial/geographical axis, whilst at the same time reducing its emotional potency and depth. The book is a good example of how the new spatial–temporal field of transnational criticism often confirms Fredric Jameson's conception of the postmodern “waning of affect.”Footnote 1 John Keats may have aimed to develop “powers of universal sympathy” (138) in the Odes or Hyperion, but there are moments where this Romantic project is foiled by Gigante's methodology, which always returns the reader to the far more materialistic and grounded life of his brother George. In The Keats Brothers, John Keats is not some “winged Psyche with awaken'd eyes” ranging endlessly “in some untrodden region,” so much as an affectionate young Londoner pining for his distant American brother. In tethering Keats to his familial feelings the author never manages to offer us a really radical Keats, even if she does give us a less tragically heroic, more recognizably human one.
In this ambitious and important dual biography, Denise Gigante tells the transatlantic story of John Keats, “The Man of Genius,” and George Keats, “The Man of Power” – “embodied sibling forms of the phenomenon we call Romanticism” (7).Footnote 1 Gigante argues convincingly that John's great poems of 1819 were, in part, an expression as much of his struggle to come to terms with George's emigration to America as of the death of his youngest brother Tom: “The first thing this speaker wants to know is why he is alone. Keats wrote The Fall of Hyperion in the void opened by the loss of his brothers” (223, original emphasis). Gigante tasks herself with a rehabilitation of George's reputation: “When [he] does show up in biographies of his more famous brother, he does not remain long – usually just long enough to disappear with John's money, leaving the poet destitute and on the brink of death, while he pursues his own fame and fortune in America” (7). Alongside a beautifully rendered, and moving, account of the poet's tragic progress east from Hampstead to his deathbed in Rome, Gigante dramatizes George's and his wife Georgiana's remarkable journey west, tracking their path from London to Philadelphia, down the Ohio River, and finally to Louisville, Kentucky. “The Cockney Pioneer,” she asserts, “deserves a place next to the Cockney Poet in the visionary company of Romanticism” (7).
This is a compelling claim, and one that is admirably pursued in a counterpoint narrative that switches deftly between life trajectories. At one memorable juncture, Gigante follows an analysis of the 1819 “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” with an account of the various sylvan hazards faced by George and his wife as, during that same year, they travelled down the Ohio river on a flatboat. Gigante's eye for unusual detail – her descriptions of the “‘Floating Islands’ (made of matted driftwood) and ‘sawyers,’ ‘planters’ and ‘snags’ (all trees that fell along the side of the river and got stuck in perilous positions)” (231) ready to sink a man's dreams – often helps throw many of John's more mellifluous lines into refreshingly stark relief. As John explores the strange geographies of his four-thousand-line Endymion, for example, George and the now pregnant Georgiana stubbornly cross the mountains of Allegheny in search of the “English Prairie,” a planned settlement founded by the English pioneers Morris Birkbeck and George Flower in 1816. In the process of shifting back and forth between the brothers' apparently contrasting, though often surprisingly consonant, lives, Gigante manages to set up a series of illuminating and important collocations.
It turns out that the Tory press was not only taking aim at John's creative efforts, but also levelling their socially intransigent critique at men like George: “The same volume of the Quarterly Review in which John Wilson Croker ridiculed the author of Endymion as a Cockney Poet also contained twenty-four closely printed pages by John Barrow and William Gifford satirizing the Cockney Pioneers” (115). The “Man of Genius” and “Man of Power” are united in their “fanatic[al]” (221, 225, 265, 266) ambition, and in their talent for provoking British reactionaries of the post-Napoleonic era. Gigante's achievement here is to show that the brothers' seemingly oppositional careers actually refract cultural currencies and stigmas back and forth across the ocean to one another: they “would continue to find themselves in shifting roles that were, if not interchangeable, at least – and most certainly – not opposite” (225). The Keats Brothers redraws Keatsian Romanticism as a series of subtle cross-oceanic cultural and economic reverberations, discernible in both the pioneering achievements of John's poetry and George's settlement.
That said, Gigante's reluctance to explicitly draw out the implications of her comparative study is sometimes a source of frustration. The introduction might have pointed to the debt or contribution of this book to the emerging Anglo-American, transatlantic, and transnational fields of study;Footnote 2 and perhaps it could have situated itself among more diverse company than the traditional Keats biographer roll call. There were also points when Gigante's bifurcated approach came apart at the seams – where one simply wanted to know more about John than George. On page 380, I really did not want to be given a detailed run-down of what the “Louisville Philosophers” were reading, or whether George at this stage “liked” Emerson or not; I obviously wanted to be told again how one of the great poets of the language died at age twenty-five in Joseph Severn's arms. This feeling in part is a tribute to how well Gigante tells the story of John's death. And of course this could be read as an effective structuring device; as the account of the dry, removed, and somewhat banal intellectual circles of Kentucky competes preposterously for page space with one of the most famous stories in literary history, Gigante manages to accentuate the distance between these once intimate brothers. She makes John's death even more harrowing by confronting us with George's total ignorance of his brother's fate; indeed it is at this point that the expanse that separates them seems truly immense.
In fact, Gigante's handling of geography is generally commanding; we follow George Keats across the ocean four times, and get an acute sense of just how arduous, time-consuming, and expensive such intercontinental journeys could be (for both people and correspondence).Footnote 3 Gigante's staging of John's unlucky passage into the Mediterranean has real flare; the ship was held at Portsmouth by a lack of wind, then violently tossed about in the Channel, before being quarantined in the Bay of Naples amid general bureaucratic and sanitary chaos. A few small and slightly pedantic points, though: the book has a habit of lightheartedly poking fun at John's sketchy geographical knowledge. When John writes to Georgiana and mistakes the banks of the Ohio for “the Banks of the Mississippi,” Gigante wryly comments that “American geography was never John's forte” (137). She continues, “One suspects – as his confusion of Balboa and Cortez, or the Ohio and the Mississippi suggests – that the poet was thinking of America more metaphorically than literally” (243). But for this affectionate condescension to have any weight, Gigante's Oxford Street definitely needed to be “just off” Hyde Park, not “Regent's Park” (25), and London's river needed to be flowing in the right direction; try as they might, no one has ever been able to “turn north in a packet ship at the mouth of the Thames into the Irish Sea” (336).
The Keats Brothers also occasionally jeopardizes its own credibility with slightly awkward “ye olde pubbe” British stereotyping: “What do travellers who find themselves stuck waiting in such places for a change of horses do anyway, but entertain each other with a tall tale or two, over a pint … or two?” (150, original emphasis). And another inaccuracy that I cannot help but flag up is the misreading of Keats's “Hither, hither, love,” supposedly a “lyric iambic trimeter” that “whistles away the crushing weight of responsibility he had been feeling in his attempt to write [Endymion]” (84). Yet this song is surely written in falling trochaic trimeter, which produces a very different semantic effect to the one described by Gigante. Rather than carelessly whistling away its worries, this three-beat lyric stutters, stresses, and hurries itself into being – “Hither, hither, love”; the meter implies an unstressed “ghost” syllable at the end of each line, which is anxiously felt as a moment of pause after every unanswered call: (/ x / x / [x]). The thwarted lover ends up completely flustered: “Hither, hither, hither’”; far from constituting a moment of abandon, this lyric fails to tempt what it wants – whether that is a prospective lover or the muse.
In spite of these reservations, this biography is a wonderfully digressive and richly suggestive contribution to Anglo-American studies. It encompasses an enormous range of fascinating and original research; particularly interesting is a discussion of the various pamphlets, books, and engravings designed variously to allure and discourage individuals from settling in America. One illustration (The Keats Brothers is sumptuously illustrated) shows two wagons travelling in opposite directions; one driver's caption reads, “I am going to Illinois!” The other, straddling a half-starved horse pulling a wrecked cart carrying a weeping wife responds, “I have been!!” (270). Gigante has a knack for conveying what was at stake for the early nineteenth-century emigrant. And in the process of elucidating the complicated bonds of an important family, this book opens up a peripheral and volatile world of American confidence tricksters, fortune seekers, fortune losers, eccentric sea captains, and competing community leaders. An impressive achievement.
The Keats Brothers is already a celebrated scholarly work, principally on the grounds that it is not a scholarly work at all. The book's novelistic prose and two adventuring heroes, many readers have noted, elevate it to the status of a page-turner – heights to which the double-romance no doubt aspires. Denise Gigante's parallel biography, outlined in the extended, sensationalizing blurb that forms the book's “Prologue,” indeed turns out to be the rarest of things – exciting archival scholarship. The readability of such “life writing” is not without compromises in other areas, however.
Taking us from Margate in 1816, where John and Tom were holidaying following illness, to Oscar Wilde's 1882 trip to Louisville, the site of George's “mansion,” Gigante's book is partly an attempt to rescue John's younger brother George from his reputation as a swindling scoundrel – similar to another biography of John's brother published this year, George Keats of Kentucky: A Life, written by a descendant, Lawrence M. Crutcher. Unlike Crutcher's book, however, Gigante's is also an attempt to recontextualize the poet in a transatlantic discourse. As much as anything else, The Keats Brothers is concerned with placing key moments in John's career – the 1818 northern walking tour with Charles Brown, the death of Tom, the writing of the Great Odes – in contexts which involve the pioneer brother in one way or another.
The historical circumstances of George's emigration are deftly drawn. Gigante's description of the effect of Morris Birkbeck's Letters from Illinois on the Romantic imagination is brilliantly conceived, constructing a network of relations extending from Thomas Jefferson to George himself. In the US itself, the social conditions of settler travel through Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, the coexistence of hopeful utopian democracy and residual slavery, and the reaction of the British establishment to the appeal of what was seen as a different economic system are exhaustive and illuminating of the whole period. Within such broad landscapes, the book avoids simply juxtaposing two otherwise separate lives. Not only is the love between John and George tenderly evoked, the wider correspondences of their social contexts are suggestively explored, too, as in this bringing together of the Cockney Pioneers and their sibling Poets:
The British establishment had cause for concern, and it responded to the emigration fever of 1818 by satirizing the Cockney Pioneers with no less fervour than it did the Cockney Poets. The same volume of the Quarterly Review in which John Wilson Croker ridiculed the author of Endymion as a Cockney Poet also contained twenty-four closely printed pages by John Barrow and William Gifford satirizing the Cockney Pioneers. (115)
Gigante's transatlantic sense of class is brilliantly researched and conceived throughout, and the various issues of economics, social status and cultural prestige are illuminated by a story of two brothers that constantly expands to encompass a comparative study of two nations.
George and John are not simply handy symbols of wider social change, however. What Gigante wants to tell us is that the two loved each other. Her sense of brotherly solidarity does much to counter the charge that George simply robbed his brother of his inheritance: we believe Gigante that John missed his younger brother when he left for America, and that George was intensely proud of his poet sibling. George's threats to “dirk” John Gibson Lockhart “à l'Américaine” after the critic's damning appraisal of “Johnny Keats” in his now notorious “Cockney School of Poets” are both amusing and full of tenderness. That George was not around to actually do so is persuasively presented as both an irredeemable loss to John, and a necessary step to his (poetic) maturity. Nonetheless, the separation was not all about suffering. The sense of John's lively curiosity about his brother's new homeland, for example, goes some way to finesse our sense of the poet's partly escapist imagination. John's mock-orientalist letter to his sister-in-law, Georgiana, is revealing in this respect:
Now you have by this time crumpled up your large Bonnet, what do you wear – a cap? do you put your hair in papers of a night? do you pay the Miss Birkbecks a morning visit – have you any tea? or do you milk-and-water with them – What place of Worship do you go to – the Quakers, the Moravians, the Unitarians, or the Methodists? Are there any flowers in bloom you like – any beautiful heaths – any streets full of Corset Makers? What sort of shoes have you to fit those pretty feet of yours? Do you desire Compliments to one another? Do you ride on Horseback? What do you have for breakfast, dinner, and supper? without mentioning lunch and bever, and wet and snack – and a bit to stay one's stomach? Do you get any Spirits – now you might easily distill some whiskey – and going into the woods, set up a whiskey shop for the Monkeys – Do you and the Miss Birkbecks get groggy on anything – a little so-soish so as to be obliged to be seen home with a Lantern? You may perhaps have a game at puss in the corner – Ladies are warranted to play at this game though they have not whiskers. Have you a fiddle in the Settlement – or at any rate a Jew's harp – which will play in spite of one's teeth … (242–43)
Placing such questions in the context of Tom's death, which John had not yet told George, Gigante provides alternative details around which we might read poems like “The Fall of Hyperion.” When we hear John write to George, “My Thoughts are very frequently in a foreign country,” such musings have been usefully grounded by Gigante in the transatlantic intercourse between the two brothers (196).
A less charitable reading would find Gigante's portraits historically and aesthetically crude. Gigante is so intent on wedging the two characters into her unreconstructed Romantic binary of “Man of Power” and “Man of Genius” that John's poetry and George's life are linked together at all costs, making the relation of each to the other seem strained and the contrast at times bizarre. Gigante's considerable abilities of contextualization can give way to obsessive analogy, and her commitment to the power/genius distinction draws occasionally fanciful portraits of each brother. Despite the considerable interest of details undermining the distinction – the interest of both brothers in bear-baiting, the complete unpreparedness of George for a life of labour in the US – Gigante never wavers from it. We surely do not believe Gigante that the otherwise sensitive George was a “Man of Power [who] made choices and stuck to them – for better or for worse,” while John's suffering from indecision defined him as a poet (152). Gigante wants to prove that to “become a Man of Power demands self-concentration. The Man of Genius must annihilate selfhood” (219). One does not, however, end up with a mansion in a foreign land through blind ambition, or write the Great Odes out of sheer quadrariness. George, as a practical man who “left the Genius to John” (193), borders on the politically suspect in its implicit worker–thinker hierarchy. That a contemporary scholar would unquestionably accept, and indeed do everything in her power as a biographer to reinforce, the notion of Romantic Genius is to be lamented. Worryingly, however, it is typical of one strand of American research on Keats. The two most influential poetry critics of the past forty years in the US, Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler, have constantly described American poetry since Wallace Stevens in the same uncritically Keatsian terms. In the particular context of biography, Gigante's Romantic Keats sometimes makes us feel that we are reading a caricature of a Romantic poet, doing little justice to her considerably detailed scholarly knowledge.
There are other problems with Gigante's novelistic approach. One cost of the story's richness is its attendant necessity of speculation. Too many episodes have the feeling of being, well, made up – and indeed are often flagged up as “imaginings” on the part of the biographer. The description of George's household at the time of Tom's death, for example, and much else about their journey along the Ohio, are interpolated from accounts of other times or even other figures, or otherwise stand as simply flights of fancy, justified implicitly as a kind of Keatsian gesture. Exegeses of individual poems are also laboured and lacking direction, and do not stand comparison with Walter Jackson Bate's exquisite close readings in his 1963 biography. The book's scholarly content, however, resides principally in the accumulation and arrangement of facts we knew nothing about, or had not placed in Keats's world; objections about its proclamations about Genius, its occasional imaginary bent and the weakness of its close readings can, in this sense, be cast aside for the kernel of compelling information they only sometimes obscure.
