New publication: Grant F. Scott, “Memorialising Keats: Severn, Headstones and Hyperion”

Grant F. Scott’s essay from the latest issue of Romanticism focuses on the understudied two years following Keats’s death, during which the poet’s legacy rested with Charles Brown, John Taylor, and Joseph Severn. Scott argues that during this time Severn (whom Scott describes as “the painter and deathbed companion, the eyewitness and first biographer, the living tabernacle of the poet’s memory”) both worked to establish his livelihood as a painter and to memorialize his friend. By drawing on two key Keats Circle letters from 1821, Scott demonstrates how both Severn’s painting, The Death of Alcibiades, and his headstone for Keats’s grave are memorials and expressions of Severn’s grieving process.

Scott questions why Severn chose to paint the figure of Alcibiades at this particular moment following Keats’s death and seeks out a connection between the subject of the painting and Severn’s experience with Keats. Moreover, in establishing these connections between Severn’s work and his grief, Grant offers a fuller picture of Severn as a man suffering from “mental and physical exhaustion, prolonged illness, loneliness and grief.”

In detailing Severn’s process of designing Keats’s headstone, Grant shares the rediscovery of two important letters from 1821 that had been presumed lost, Taylor’s letter to Severn of August 14, 1821, and Brown’s letter of August 21, 28, 1821. Grant’s essay includes images of the letters, as well as a study of the letters’ contents as they pertain to Severn’s design for Keats’s gravestone. Grant’s reading of the letters reveals the shortcomings in William Sharp’s interpretation, and he includes a detailed sketch of the proposed design of the headstone which Sharp failed to include in his biography. This sketch, Grant demonstrates, was added by Severn to the empty space of the letter after reading Taylor’s advice about the gravestone. As Grant points out in a further study of Severn’s sketch, Severn conceived “the tomb not only as stone but as page,” giving the impression in his initial sketch of Keats writing his own epitaph. Grant contends, “Along with his deathbed portrait of Keats, it is arguably the most genuine and original, the truest work of art he [Severn] ever produced.”

Turning, then, to Severn’s The Death of Alcibiades, Grant demonstrates how in a description of the painting Severn sent to his father, he “pays tribute to Keats’s own engagement with visual art in a language that is highly tactile, sensual and kinetic.” In this way, and through tracing the other literary sources for Severn’s painting, Grant shows how Severn’s choice of subject is bound up in his memories of Keats and in his grieving process. Through a study of the connections between The Death of Alcibiades and Keats’s work, specifically Hyperion, Grant offers a way to rethink interpretations of Severn’s deathbed images of Keats. He states, “It [the painting] transforms the day-to-day indignities, embarrassments and physical horror of the death chamber into an imagined finale where Keats triumphs over both his illness and his enemies.”

You can find “Memorialising Keats: Severn, Headstones and Hyperion” in Romanticism 30.2 (2024): 180–200. DOI: 10.3366/rom.2024.0646