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Written in Water: Keats's final Journey
On 17th September 1820, accompanied by his friend Joseph Severn, John Keats left London for Italy on board the Maria Crowther in a desperate bid to restore his health. Anguished at the thought of having to part, possibly for ever, from his fiancée and his friends, troubled by money worries and broken in body and mind, the young poet launched on his last journey on earth with both a sense of hope and a deep foreboding that his efforts would be in vain. Despite Keats's own assertion that by then he no longer felt a citizen of the world and was leading a “posthumous life”, his final five months were filled with events of great biographical interest, and deserve to be examined much more carefully.
Using exclusively primary sources and first-hand accounts, Keats's editor and translator Alessandro Gallenzi has pieced together all the available material – adding newly discovered and previously unpublished documents – to help the reader follow the poet step by step from his departure and tumultuous voyage to Naples, through to his arduous journey to Rome and harrowing death in his lodgings by the Spanish Steps in February 1821. The result is a gripping narrative packed with detail and new revelations, one that invites us to strip away the Romantic patina that has formed over the story of Keats's short life, offering a wider picture that enhances our understanding of both poet and man.
Using exclusively primary sources and first-hand accounts, Keats's editor and translator Alessandro Gallenzi has pieced together all the available material – adding newly discovered and previously unpublished documents – to help the reader follow the poet step by step from his departure and tumultuous voyage to Naples, through to his arduous journey to Rome and harrowing death in his lodgings by the Spanish Steps in February 1821. The result is a gripping narrative packed with detail and new revelations, one that invites us to strip away the Romantic patina that has formed over the story of Keats's short life, offering a wider picture that enhances our understanding of both poet and man.
- GenresBiographyNonfiction
320 pages, Paperback
Published December 13, 2022
2 people are currently reading
30 people want to read
About the author
Alessandro Gallenzi
21 books3 followersTranslator, poet, playwright and novelist. He graduated from the Università La Sapienza before moving to London in 1997. Founder of Hesperus Press, Alma Books and Alma Classics.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 2, 2024
This book covers the last several months of Keats's life, the extranational journey after his terminal diagnosis when he left England in a last-ditch effort to defeat tuberculosis, one which he knew was almost certainly hopeless.
In a full-length biography, this period receives an approximately 50-page treatment if that (I have indeed read more than a handful of them since this is my second favorite poet after Shakespeare). Most of this book is focused only on the last days. This is certainly not a "happy" book because it is about the terminal illness of a gifted poet who died at age 25 from tuberculosis, which is very treatable today but painfully fatal then. Think a kind of cancer of the lungs where you regurgitate bleeding from your lungs until the tissue of them are wasted away. In fact, the autopsy demonstrated that he had nearly no lung tissue left when he died.
This book covers that period specifically with a lot of primary source material. It's not happy reading, but you probably knew that going in. It is, though, a very important contribution to Keats studies since is only covered in larger biographies where only the saddest letters, materials, and accounts are covered - deservedly, but only to continue his tragic trajectory. This is a deep focus of those last days.
The only flaw is that this account is a gathering of valuable primary sources but many diversions and byways that are a little off the narrative. Just a few but enough to make me lean to four rather than five stars.
This doesn't make this book secondary. It is a valuable addition to Keats studies and well worth an addition to the Keats canon. This period did need a little more fleshing out. Well worth the read for sure. I'm glad I have it and read it. Probably for Keats enthusiasts mainly, of which I am certainly one.
Side note: if you are an enthusiastic lover of Keats and like literary pilgrimages as I do, when in Rome, the Keats Shelley Museum is right off the Spanish Steps. Lots of items on display and the room where he died. Worth diving into if even for half an hour. If you are really enthusiastic and have the time even though Rome is full of plenty to see and do, the Protestant Cemetary is where he is famously buried. It's slightly west of Rome's center and his grave is in the left corner when you enter. As soon as you enter, walk immediately left and you can't miss it. Big Oscar Wilde poem next to him in marble. Joseph Severn, his physician, chose to be buried next to him. Shelley is buried there as well, and I missed it! Next time...
In a full-length biography, this period receives an approximately 50-page treatment if that (I have indeed read more than a handful of them since this is my second favorite poet after Shakespeare). Most of this book is focused only on the last days. This is certainly not a "happy" book because it is about the terminal illness of a gifted poet who died at age 25 from tuberculosis, which is very treatable today but painfully fatal then. Think a kind of cancer of the lungs where you regurgitate bleeding from your lungs until the tissue of them are wasted away. In fact, the autopsy demonstrated that he had nearly no lung tissue left when he died.
This book covers that period specifically with a lot of primary source material. It's not happy reading, but you probably knew that going in. It is, though, a very important contribution to Keats studies since is only covered in larger biographies where only the saddest letters, materials, and accounts are covered - deservedly, but only to continue his tragic trajectory. This is a deep focus of those last days.
The only flaw is that this account is a gathering of valuable primary sources but many diversions and byways that are a little off the narrative. Just a few but enough to make me lean to four rather than five stars.
This doesn't make this book secondary. It is a valuable addition to Keats studies and well worth an addition to the Keats canon. This period did need a little more fleshing out. Well worth the read for sure. I'm glad I have it and read it. Probably for Keats enthusiasts mainly, of which I am certainly one.
Side note: if you are an enthusiastic lover of Keats and like literary pilgrimages as I do, when in Rome, the Keats Shelley Museum is right off the Spanish Steps. Lots of items on display and the room where he died. Worth diving into if even for half an hour. If you are really enthusiastic and have the time even though Rome is full of plenty to see and do, the Protestant Cemetary is where he is famously buried. It's slightly west of Rome's center and his grave is in the left corner when you enter. As soon as you enter, walk immediately left and you can't miss it. Big Oscar Wilde poem next to him in marble. Joseph Severn, his physician, chose to be buried next to him. Shelley is buried there as well, and I missed it! Next time...
February 15, 2023
Alessandro Gallenzi may not consider himself a professional scholar, but he is an accomplished one and an unquestionably gifted researcher. Yet, his sublime imagery remains unburdened by the immense detail in Written in Water. As Keats would wish, Gallenzi’s watchful prose comes as naturally as leaves to a tree, and some of the descriptive passages, particularly those taken from Theodore Dwight’s A Journal of a Tour of Italy in the year 1821, remind the reader of Manzoni’s lyrical opus I Promesi Sposi.
Paradoxically for one absorbed by a search for truth, there are echoes of Herodotus in Gallenzi’s unlaboured voice. Yet, unlike the anecdotal Greek historian, this tale of Keats’ final months has a profound authenticity made possible by the author’s relentless scrutiny. His assertion that ‘deduction should be allowed but only if accompanied by some relevant testimony or circumstantial evidence’ acts as a counterweight, avoiding the speculative weakness of many previous biographers of Keats. Without that resolve, memoirs become no more than a pale sister of truth, or perhaps ‘the flatfooted affirmation of possibility as truth’, as Anthony Burgess once described historical fiction.
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty.’ Gallenzi endorses Keats’s poetic declaration, using an interlude in his chronicle of the poet’s final days to denounce the deficiencies of William Sharp’s biography of Keats’s deathbed companion, Joseph Severn. In a brutal declaration of his resistance to the ‘dangerous allure of romantic biography’, Gallenzi exposes the hypocrisy of Sharp’s ‘cavalier editorial practices’. However, this lengthy exposé of Severn’s first biographer feels unnecessary, for all references to Sharp are redundant since the publication of Grant F. Scott’s masterpiece Joseph Severn, Letters and Memoirs (Ashgate, 2005).
The deployment of maps, visa entries, letters and photographs illuminates Written in Water like a trail of breadcrumbs leading us to the premature death of a poet who would have been, had he lived, the greatest of us, according to Tennyson.
Whilst this is a biography made deliberately incomplete by its focus on Keats’ final months, it is my favourite account of the poet since Life of John Keats by Sidney Colvin in 1917. This exquisite cocktail of beauty and truth makes Written in Water, quite simply, a chronicle of Keats’ last days composed with a purity that only truth and beauty possess.
Paradoxically for one absorbed by a search for truth, there are echoes of Herodotus in Gallenzi’s unlaboured voice. Yet, unlike the anecdotal Greek historian, this tale of Keats’ final months has a profound authenticity made possible by the author’s relentless scrutiny. His assertion that ‘deduction should be allowed but only if accompanied by some relevant testimony or circumstantial evidence’ acts as a counterweight, avoiding the speculative weakness of many previous biographers of Keats. Without that resolve, memoirs become no more than a pale sister of truth, or perhaps ‘the flatfooted affirmation of possibility as truth’, as Anthony Burgess once described historical fiction.
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty.’ Gallenzi endorses Keats’s poetic declaration, using an interlude in his chronicle of the poet’s final days to denounce the deficiencies of William Sharp’s biography of Keats’s deathbed companion, Joseph Severn. In a brutal declaration of his resistance to the ‘dangerous allure of romantic biography’, Gallenzi exposes the hypocrisy of Sharp’s ‘cavalier editorial practices’. However, this lengthy exposé of Severn’s first biographer feels unnecessary, for all references to Sharp are redundant since the publication of Grant F. Scott’s masterpiece Joseph Severn, Letters and Memoirs (Ashgate, 2005).
The deployment of maps, visa entries, letters and photographs illuminates Written in Water like a trail of breadcrumbs leading us to the premature death of a poet who would have been, had he lived, the greatest of us, according to Tennyson.
Whilst this is a biography made deliberately incomplete by its focus on Keats’ final months, it is my favourite account of the poet since Life of John Keats by Sidney Colvin in 1917. This exquisite cocktail of beauty and truth makes Written in Water, quite simply, a chronicle of Keats’ last days composed with a purity that only truth and beauty possess.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews