Memorialising Keats: Severn, Headstones and Hyperion

Abstract

For obvious reasons, Keats's biographers have focused primarily on the last five months of the poet’s life and on the making of his reputation in the later nineteenth century. They have spent very little time, however, on the two uncertain years that followed the poet’s death when his legacy, largely in the hands of Brown, Taylor and Severn, hung in the balance. As Severn was recovering from Keats's death, he fought to establish his own livelihood as a painter and find an adequate means of memorialising his friend. He was preoccupied with two works of art, The Death of Alcibiades and the headstone for Keats's grave. I argue that these artworks represent complex expressions of Severn's grief and in this sense are both memorials, though Alcibiades disguises its aims in a conventional historical painting. In the strong reading of Hyperion embedded in the picture, Severn finds a way of coming to terms with the traumatic aftermath of Keats's death as well as the critical attacks on his poetry. My recent rediscovery of two key manuscript letters of this time by members of the Keats Circle lends support to the argument.