Keatsian Correspondences: A Tragedy in Five Acts

Graduation Year

2020

Publication Date

Spring 2020

Comments

At the request of the author, this paper is not available for download. Bona fide researchers may consult it by visiting the University Archives in Tate Archives & Special Collections; contact archives@iwu.edu for details.

Abstract

In recent decades, key scholarship and projects have affirmed—at long last—the importance and independent literary quality of John Keats’s personal correspondence. And while creative endeavors like Tom Clark’s Junkets on a Sad Planet have further engaged Keats’s remarkable letters, none have gone so far as to audaciously assume a personal acquaintanceship with the long-dead Romantic. Uniquely processing a personal trauma which echoes Keats’s biography in numerous, intriguing ways, “Keatsian Correspondences: A Tragedy in Five Acts” does just that. Communicating a semi-autobiographical narrative via a phantasmal prose-poem and accompanying analytic preface, this project uses Keats’s letters—specifically, his lengthy September 1819, journal letter to George and Georgiana Keats—as a template and, with the necessary casualness of someone who has—in reality—voyeuristically probed the writer’s many revealing letters, is addressed directly, intimately, and improbably to John Keats himself.

Disciplines

English Language and Literature

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