Keats's Death: Towards a Posthumous Poetics‪.‬

Keats is desiring his death with dreadfull [sic] earnestness--the idea of death seems his only comfort--the only prospect of ease--he talks of it with delight--it sooths his present torture--The strangeness of his mind every day surprisses [sic] us--no one feeling or one notion like any other being ... (Joseph Severn to John Taylor, January 26, 1821) (1) AT THE END OF KEATS'S LIFE, HIS COMPANION IN ROME, JOSEPH SEVERN, wrote to friends in England of the poet's extreme physical and mental condition. Describing a "dreadfull earnestness" in Keats's desire for death that would release him from the "torture" of his tuberculosis-ravaged life, Severn emphasizes the gravity of the poet's situation even as he notices in Keats a "strangeness" that posits already a sense of difference or, indeed, distance between Keats and his immediate human community. Severn speaks of how Keats not only endures the ravages of consumption but witnesses his own demise. Of course, death as an actuality and an enigma thoroughly permeates Keats's thought well before this terrible Roman epilogue. His medical training and familiarity with his mother's and brother's experience of consumption give him some knowledge of the eventualities associated with what is now his own fate. Despite the torments of death's approach, the "strangeness of his mind" here at the end echoes Keats's earlier intimacy with death as a literal threat and as a principal subject of poetic inquiry: A consummate awareness of the ineffability and poetic inevitability of this position as a witness to one's own death recurs throughout Keats's poetry and correspondence engaged as it is in a relationship (if not a dialogue) with "the idea of death."(2)