Gigante explores story of Keats brothers

 

While John is the only Keats to come to mind when that name is invoked today, another Keats — George, John’s brother — had an equally compelling story to tell, according to English professor Denise Gigante. She explores this story in her latest book, titled “The Keats Brothers: The Life of John and George.”

 

For Gigante, whose literary focus is Romanticism, John’s integral relationship with his brother George has always remained a point of fascination. However, the idea of a dual biography did not originate as a concept-driven endeavor, but came about serendipitously. While searching for more of the famed correspondence between John and George in Louisville, Gigante studied papers in the Naomi Joy Kirk Collection at The Filson Historical Society in Louisville, Kentucky. The documents included Kirk’s unpublished thesis on George. With this new body of insights into George’s life, a story was laid out before Gigante for her to piece together.

 

Gigante planned for this book to focus of the lesser-known brother George, but she also wanted to include another side of his story apart from his relationship with John.

 

“I also wanted to tell the story of so many immigrants like George, who came to the United States around 1818 from the Old Country, the U.K., with visions of living out their dreams,” Gigante said.

 

However, this factor of the book is only separated from John in a direct sense. According to Creative Writing Program director Eavan Boland, the struggles of George in a foreign land coincide with the raw world John so often evoked in his poetry.

 

Instead of the glory land of opportunity that George had anticipated, he found much disappointment and very little beauty in America. As one of the principle figures of Romantic poetry, John is too often lumped into the canon of the movement by his work alone. The book however serves to remove him from this context, or in Boland’s words, “places him the world he came from instead of the world he made.”

 

While a biography covering two people, one being arguably the most highly regarded poets of the English language and the other unknown and mostly unaccomplished, is an unusual tactic for a biographer to take, “The Keats Brothers” serves a distinct purpose.

 

As poet Stanley Plumly put it, “Denise Gigante and her new biography of these two brothers take on the pointedly difficult task of bringing George to life again as the crucially essential character of John’s tragic life.”

 

Plumly, Boland, several faculty members, four Stegner Fellows and a descendant of George Keats himself celebrated the book at a Nov. 7 English Department Literary Event held in the brothers’ honor.

 

The speakers highlighted portions of the book that brought insight to the influence geographic separation had on the brothers’ lives also rendering a place for the brothers story in a familiar and relatable context, the peaks and falls of success that define everyone’s life.

 

Boland touched on successes of the novel while presenting her summary.

 

“It is a charting of the age they lived in seen through disorder, courage and misfortune of their lives,” she said. “In this book, John Keats is saved from the light, and George is saved form the shadows.”

 

Intermingled with these insights were the Stegner Fellows’ recitations, which brought select pieces of Keats’ poetry to life. The poems were chosen in an effort to offer an appropriate context to the brothers’ relationship and highlight their dependence on each other during times of trouble.

 

In all, the conference reflected the perspective on Keats presented in the book, which Gigante later described as “the lens of his own profound meditations on life and on death, on suffering and joy and the many fluctuations that constitute our shared human experience.”

 

The crowded audience, old and young, graduate and undergraduate, teachers and students, largely affirmed Gigante’s message: Although the words of John Keats and his less famous brother, George, were written two centuries ago, their poetry still touches the hearts of readers today.

 

CORRECTION: In a previous version of this article and in the print edition, The Daily incorrectly reported that Gigante discovered primary source documents for her research in Naomi Joy Kirk’s home. In fact, she read through papers in the Naomi Joy Kirk Collection at the Filson Historical Society in Louisville, Ky., which were not primary sources.