Looking Through Death's Veil: Keats, Mortality, and Medicine

Acknowledgements There are numerous people to whom I owe due gratitude. First and foremost I would like to thank my advisor Professor Terry Tyler, for his support, wisdom, and endless patience throughout the entire thesis process. You can't get to the show without a chauffeur. I would like to thank Professor Alison Hickey, Wellesley's own Romantic poet specialist, for introducing me to the Romantic poets, and without whom my liaison with Johnny may never have commenced. and the rest of the English department for approving my thesis proposal. Additional thanks to Lisa Easley for promptly answering all my general thesis-related questions, and to the staff at the Wellesley College Library and Technology Services for assistance in obtaining research materials. A special thank you to my parents, who cheered me on from the sidelines and for sending me such an unparalleled amount of Keats literature for my 22 nd birthday. A big thanks to my English thesis compadres Alison Lanier and Elizabeth Grice for keeping me sane with our late-night thesis councils. I owe thanks as well to Toons and my 2 East friends for bearing with me this past year through all my Keatsian philosophic rants. And lastly a tremendous thanks to John Keats—for his appreciation of life, his philosophy on beauty, and his inspiring poetry—who I now feel I know better than I know myself. 4 Introduction Often praised for having developed a style heavily loaded with sensuality and more epicurean and alive than any poet before him, John Keats (1795-1821) has been characterized as the quintessential Romantic poet. Continuously attempting to reconcile opposites such as mortality with immortality, and pleasure with pain, Keats strove to find beauty on both sides of every opposition. In his short literary career he left behind a body of work consisting of both poems and letters, expressing his youthful passion, his musings on love, art, philosophy, death, and an extraordinary intensity for life itself. Keats left an impact that remains all the more remarkable because of the brevity of his literary career, his life cut short by tuberculosis at the age of 25. Because of his medical training and a family history of the disease, Keats was aware of his impending death, and as a result of that awareness, many of his works reflect a desire to reconcile his own mortality with his desire to achieve immortality through his poetry. Keats has become …