Denise Gigante - The Keats Brothers. The Life of John and George [2011][A]

Book Description
Publication Date: November 9, 2011
John and George Keats—Man of Genius and Man of Power, to use John’s words—embodied sibling forms of the phenomenon we call Romanticism. George’s 1818 move to the western frontier of the United States, an imaginative leap across four thousand miles onto the tabula rasa of the American dream, created in John an abysm of alienation and loneliness that would inspire the poet’s most plangent and sublime poetry. Denise Gigante’s account of this emigration places John’s life and work in a transatlantic context that has eluded his previous biographers, while revealing the emotional turmoil at the heart of some of the most lasting verse in English.

In most accounts of John’s life, George plays a small role. He is often depicted as a scoundrel who left his brother destitute and dying to pursue his own fortune in America. But as Gigante shows, George ventured into a land of prairie fires, flat-bottomed riverboats, wildcats, and bears in part to save his brothers, John and Tom, from financial ruin. There was a vital bond between the brothers, evident in John’s letters to his brother and sister-in-law, Georgina, in Louisville, Kentucky, which run to thousands of words and detail his thoughts about the nature of poetry, the human condition, and the soul. Gigante demonstrates that John’s 1819 Odes and Hyperion fragments emerged from his profound grief following George’s departure and Tom’s death—and that we owe these great works of English Romanticism in part to the deep, lasting fraternal friendship that Gigante reveals in these pages.

Reviews
It is a tribute to Gigante that she adds so much to our understanding of Keats's life by going beyond the books of Bate, Ward, Gittings, and Motion. This is accomplished not only through original research but through new insights, many of them provided by her deep sense of John and George as brothers. (Harold Bloom)

A tremendous amount of research has gone into this dual biography of John and George Keats, and it has paid off handsomely, especially in the sections on George's life in America. This vivid and lively biography will appeal to readers who care about Keats's poetry and life as well as those interested in the transatlantic phenomenon of Romanticism, embodied in sibling forms in the two brothers. (David Mikics, University of Houston)

If we read the orphaning of John Keats as the dominant autobiographic source of the imagination in his poetry--including the early deaths of his parents and his brother Tom--we must acknowledge that George Keats's emigration to America, in June 1818, is even more crucial to the great writing--including the extraordinary letters as well as the poems--that follows. Denise Gigante's The Keats Brothers is as unique as it is compelling in this story of the separation between George and John. And it is brilliant in its understanding of the consequences of the parting to the poet's life and art--as both desperation and inspiration. The narrative of the necessity and bravery of the brother who leaves England for the frontier of a new and wild country has for too long been neglected. With rare depth, thoroughness, and grace, Gigante brings into balance the American half of the whole of John Keats's tragic biography. (Stanley Plumly, University of Maryland)

A thoroughly researched and beautifully written account that has some of the appeal of a New Yorker profile. (Jack Stillinger, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

[The Keats Brothers] takes a step beyond standard biographies in several ways. Most importantly, it explores the central role George played in recognizing and emotionally supporting John's genius. (Publishers Weekly 2011-08-29)

Gigante has had the clever idea of telling the stories of John and George as parallel lives, a dual biography of brothers. Of course, no single achievement of George's matches John's in any imaginable way...The challenge for Gigante is to give sufficiently rich detail concerning George's travels in America to outweigh the conspicuous achievement gap between the two brothers. Mostly, she succeeds brilliantly. The American wilderness, she points out, had long appealed to English poets, as a land of utopian social possibility and sublime natural imagery...Gigante memorably contrasts these imaginary worlds with the slovenly wilderness and grimy inhabitants that George and Georgiana witnessed as they traveled by barge and wagon into the interior...The book ends splendidly...with the apparition of Oscar Wilde, long after George's death by tuberculosis in 1841, lecturing on John Keats, "the real Adonis of our age," to the people of Louisville in 1882, and admiring Keats's manuscripts in the hands of his niece, Emma. (Christopher Benfey New York Times Book Review 2011-10-16)

[Gigante's] book, with its transatlantic sweep and epic narrative--including cameos from John James Audubon, Emerson, and more--offers a detailed study of the stunning vicissitudes of the brothers' lives. Even those familiar with the poet's timeline will see it anew through the lens of this intense sibling relationship...As she unravels the compelling story of John's and George's lives, Gigante easily overturns stereotypes about academics churning out dry prose. She has the descriptive power of a novelist or poet...The Keats Brothers is a major accomplishment, one that will surely influence biographies of Keats yet to come. (Carmela Ciuraru Barnes & Noble Review 2011-10-17)

There have been plenty of good biographies of Keats but Denise Gigante has had the bright idea of writing a dual biography intertwining the sad history of John with the much less well-known story of his brother George...Gigante examines their sometimes strained fraternal intimacy in this resourceful and engaging book...Some of the most gripping pages in this lively and consistently interesting book are not about poetry at all, but rather recreate the adventures of the George Keatses across America, through Ohio to Cincinnati and on to Louisville. Gigante portrays very well the sheer discomfort of it all, the whiskey-soaked world of the steamboats, the reckless and chaotic entrepreneurialism and the accompanying ecological horrors of forest-clearing--out of which George did very nicely thank you...Gigante chooses to tell the story of Keats's last months by flipping to and fro between George in America and John, first in London and then in Italy, failing in the grip of his appalling disease, with "no religion to support him" (as Joseph Severn, his companion in the last weeks, said). This decision gives the book a "meanwhile back at the ranch" quality which is nothing but a pleasure, and creates some sad contrasts that Gigante is too well mannered to labor...The decision to tell their lives in parallel does make a kind of sense, and Denise Gigante has done it with much style. (Seamus Perry Literary Review 2011-11-01)

We not only learn a lot about George, who invariably and inevitably plays only a minor role in biographies of his brother--but as the lives illuminate each other, new light is shed upon material that we thought we knew already...Why is The Keats Brothers such a terrific read? What is the secret of this stunning achievement, and what makes this book so unputdownable?...The first is that [Gigante] is a hell of a storyteller. Departing from Plutarch's model, Gigante adroitly alternates between John's life and George's, counterpointing the one with the other, drawing out parallels and contrasts with an ease that can inspire only admiration...The second reason is that Gigante possesses imagination to an uncommon degree. And what is a biography without imagination, empathy and judgement? The opening pages alone (set in Margate in 1816) and the epilogue (Oscar Wilde visiting Louisville, Kentucky, in 1882) are dazzling gems of inspired life writing--but there are many, many more such passages...Gigante has that eye for the telling detail that only the born storyteller has--and, pace Plutarch, she gives us both lives and history: her vignettes of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, of New York and Louisville are first-rate history made alive--they open up a new world, and the New World, to Keats scholars. In a way different from William Wordsworth, John Keats knew how to make poetry out of loss. In Denise Gigante he has found a congenial biographer, writing as she does about what remains, even if there is all ocean between. (Christopher Bode Times Higher Education 2011-11-10)

In The Keats Brothers, Denise Gigante has crafted a detailed, fast-moving life of this strong-minded poet and the siblings who helped sustain him...Out of primary documents she reanimates a major poet and his world, and crafts a transatlantic adventure story with a novelist's gift for moving narrative along. In brief, Gigante convincingly demonstrates that George Keats, the poet's junior by sixteen months, served as John's "muse." (Patrick Kurp Quarterly Conversation 2011-12-05)

A bold, expressive style makes this an engaging narrative throughout. The love, misunderstanding, and rivalry between a spiritual adventurer and a worldly one are emblematic of contrasts in 19th-century British culture. (R. K. Mookerjee Choice 2012-03-01)

What makes Gigante's approach different...is her determination to weave the life of the poet back into the family woof, to see the Keats siblings John, George, Tom, and Fanny as their own most relevant personal and social unit, "unmoored" and isolated from society as they were by the early deaths of their parents...It is George's life that generates everything that is rich and strange about the biography, and there is much to relish in Gigante's extensively researched and detailed account of the American republic during the early decades of the nineteenth century. (William Christie Australian Book Review 2012-04-01)

Denise Gigante's lively The Keats Brothers is a dual biography in which both John and George play equal parts...Gigante details the brothers' lives in Great Britain and America but excels when discussing John's poems--calling attention to less familiar works like 'Hither, hither, love.' (David Mason Wall Street Journal 2012-11-22)

Beautifully written...[It] comes closest to answering the question of when Keats became a great writer...Gigante's method of writing the Lives of John and George in parallel allows her to bring into focus the key fact that other biographers sometimes forget: that the reason why Keats went north in the first place was to say goodbye to George as he set sail for America from Liverpool. George's distance--and, soon after, the even profounder absence created by [their brother] Tom's death--was the primary force that shaped Keats in the year from the autumn of 1818 when he wrote his greatest poetry. (Jonathan Bate Times Literary Supplement 2012-12-07)

There have been at least ten major literary biographies of Keats over the last fifty years, and several of them remain classics of the genre…Yet fresh and more dispassionate points of view are still possible. Denise Gigante, in The Keats Brothers, gives us the story as seen essentially from the outside, through the eyes of Keats’s younger brothers Tom and especially George, the least like the poet…Far from reducing Keats, this fraternal view of a more vulnerable man has the paradoxical effect of making Keats even more striking and vivid, as no doubt Gigante intended. (Richard Holmes New York Review of Books 2013-11-07)

About the Author
Denise Gigante is Professor of English at Stanford University.