Keats and the Company of Books

The mortal grip of books on the hearts and minds of readers is best illustrated by the life and prolonged death of John Keats. With his friend Joseph Severn, Keats left London in the fall of 1820 and settled in Rome, in a house on the Spanish Steps, hoping the climate would help ease the tuberculosis that has already claimed his mother and one brother. As his condition worsened, the sight of books repelled him. W. Jackson Bate, in John Keats, tells us:

“Books were associated, and had been from the beginning, with all that was immortal. As such, they were now completely remote, a hopeless contrast with the way in which he was ending – an end after so little had been done. Less distressing (he was now quoting Lear for the last time) were things about him that frankly `smelled of mortality.’”

Soon, Keats changed his mind, and Severn read aloud to him from Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Holy Dying, Plato, Maria Edgeworth’s novels, Pilgrim’s Progress and Don Quixote. Bate reports:

“It was within another few days (January 25-26) that he could no longer `bear any books.’ But generally, from now until the end, he would turn to Severn and ask him to read for awhile from Jeremy Taylor.”

The myth of Keats as the sensitive, wraith-like soul is given the lie by the stoicism, courage and even good cheer with which he endured unendurable suffering. Two weeks before his death, his rejection of books passed – a change I find touching and encouraging. I have never felt so sick or miserable as to reject books. They represent the last worldly pleasure I would sacrifice. Here’s Bate:

“Now, on the contrary, he wanted to have books close to him – as many as possible. Severn had just become reconciled to Keats’s talk `of the quiet grave as the first rest he can ever have’ when suddenly this `great desire for books came across his mind.’ However puzzled by this changeability, Severn tried to do something as Keats kept calling for more and more books to be near him. `I got all the books on hand.’ He was of course unable to read. But hour after hour, for three full days, the mere presence of these books acted on him (to use Severn’s word) as a `charm.’”

Besides family and friends, I would ask for the company of Shakespeare, Montaigne, Boswell's Life of Johnson – and Keats, who died Feb. 23, 1821. He was 25 years old.