Letters of John Keats to Fanny Brawne

John Keats wrote these letters to Fanny Brawne in the shadow of his own death. He was twenty-three when they met, twenty-five when tuberculosis killed him, and every word he pressed into paper during those final years burns with the knowledge of his own brief time. These are not the composed verses that made him famous, but something rawer: the unguarded overflow of a man utterly, desperately in love. He writes to her from Hampstead and Winchester, from the rooms where he was finishing 'Ode to a Nightingale' and 'Bright Star,' and the tenderness alternates with a terrible prescience - he knew what was consuming him, and still he reached for her. The letters reveal Keats the man rather than Keats the poet: jealous, anxious, playful, and achingly sincere. They were published against his explicit wishes, but for readers, that transgression is our gift. Here is theRomantic idealist caught in the actual machinery of the heart, and it is devastating.