ENG 350 – Keats Seminar

Roads of the Dead, by Oluwaseun Eleyinafe and Tiffany Galloway

Chapter 15 – Dark Passages speaks about the dark passages that Keats wrote. They were speaking about the time that Tom was sick. But there was still something ominous about the fact that there was something wrong entirely because Keats wanted to go to Exeter, but he was confined by a terrible storm that just wrecked everything in his path. It is worth fitting to note that the journey to Exeter was usually about twenty seven hours. Keats bought a ticket for the Royal Mail that would take him to Exeter. He reached the place although he got soaked in wet clothing which was dangerous to his health.

He rested in the New London Inn before taking another coach from Haldon Hill to Teignmouth. At the time, it was a fashionable watering-place whose population was around four thousand. George, Keats, and Tom all walked over to a townhouse at 20 Strand. The townhouse was some fifty feet from the Teignmouth port. Keats experienced days of rain that was unusual in the sense that it was rainy, misty and snowy among other descriptions. Yet, in the most cruel of weather, Keats managed to write to Bailey of how great the English and Englishmen were – particularly Shakespeare, in comparison to the people of Devonshire whom he found to be dwindled. Once he saw that the rain was not going to abate anytime soon, he told Reynolds via mail that he had finished reading the fourth book of Endymion and he would be writing the preface for the book soon. But soon rather turned to be much much later than anticipated because George and Brown in their letters advised that the printer wanted the copy immediately. He then sent the manuscript for Endymion with a resounding dedication. Once the rain had stopped, he took a walk through the Teign Estuary which led him to Bishopsteignton and Kingsteignton. The walk took him back through the opposite shore via Combteignhead to Shalton. When he wrote to Haydon regarding the maiden’s sweet/Of the Market Street, these associations later reappeared there.

Chapter 16 – Walking North

When Tom and Keats came together to the Bull Inn for the last time, they saw that their paths were diverged from each other. Tom was beginning to have an actual life while making a living, while Keats was the one on the highway north, being estranged from being the surgeon he might have become. The encounter indicated that Keats was going to focus on poetry full time and then everything from there would set the tone for what was to come. One of the reasons surrounding this visit was the fact that they were going to go their separate ways. Keats had written ‘Give me your Patience’ and it is an acrostic that he wrote for his wife Georgiana. A final stanza further showed the origin of her surname. They said their final farewell at the Crown Inn in Liverpool because Keats would later go with Brown to Lancaster. The trip over there meant that Keats had already made his path to be clear, that there was no question he wanted to be a poet. In addition, the trip also meant that Keats had carved his own path going forward as well.

Chapter 17: Sleepless Nights

Maria Dilke writes to her father-in-law contesting that Keats’ brother was ill, and that Keats should be sent for, unknowing that Keats was ill himself with a sore throat and a constant toothache, however, still en route to London with no prior indication of Tom being in the last stages of pulmonary tuberculosis which has ravaged his body for the past year.When Keats saw the state in which Tom was in, rampant memories of disease and death ran through his mind as he recalled his mother’s passing and left him feelings conquered, despite the progress in recent weeks. Keats devoted all of his efforts to comforting his brother in his final days. Keats did not inform their brother George, nor their sister, Georgiana of Tom’s fatal condition with hopes of keeping Tom’s condition concealed from the public but transcribed his thoughts of Tom’s lack of progression from his fatal state in note form. Keats dismayed the idea of being confined to a sickroom, as he dulled his anxiety, and his own pain as well as Tom’s with laudanum, an opium, and alcohol. Keats understood, as he was educated in medicine, that breathing the air of the sick, as was called, tubercular bacteria,  was not prosperous to his own health despite the necessity of his presence to care for his brother Tom. Tom ventured out of the sick room as much as possible, troubling himself with as many errands which would keep him from that perpetual situation.

Keats ventured off in London to visit the Reynold’s family at Little Britain, and by early September. Quickly. Lockhart’s transcribed attack on Hunt was predictable, but Keats was ever so shocked at the venomous nature in which Lockhart directed his comments towards Keats politicized sense of poetry in reference to Endymion’s change in the poetic idiom. Moreover, Lockhart’s rough tongue, with the inclusions of Z’s transcribed torment had critics tormenting Keats on his reasons from leaving medicine to go into poetry.  Hazlitt one of the those critics. Keats dined with Hazlitt to discuss the turmoil of Keats work.

Keats recollects the first time he had seen Fanny Brawne, though there is no definite indication that they officially met, as he expressed his guiltiness of his admiration for a  woman as his brother lied in bed dying pulmonary tuberculosis. Keats decides to continue writing poetry since that seemed less of an insult to his brother’s state he tells Reynold’s.  It seems the meeting of eyes between Ketas and Fawny ignited the inspiration of Dante’s Inferno, which is ablaze with sexual energy.

Roe goes on to discuss Keats’s transition from Endymion’s “mawkish poetical romance”, to that of Hyperion which would be composed in a more “naked and Grecian” manner. Keats goes on to write Hyperion, based on of the despair of the Titans after their fall to the Olympians in Greek mythology, highlighted Keats ability in blank verse.

Previously Endymion, and now certainly Hyperion had caused an uproar in the poetic community, especially noted by The Examiner, thus indicating the magnitude of Keats’ ability as a poet as others came to his defense. However,  Keats’ defense was not enough for him to overlook the sneers from the Quaterly Review’s of his latest work which left him up throughout the night talking sensitive bitterness of the treatment he was enduring as a notable poet. In the midst of this madness, Tom died Tuesday, December 1 as he was eased to his death with an opium.