Lives of the Dead Poets

Biography has played an important role in the canonization of Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge. Each archive is saturated with stories of the life prematurely cut off or, in Coleridge’s case, of promise wasted in indolence; with reminiscences of contemporaries who describe subjects singularly unsuited to this world; and with stranger materials—death masks, bits of bone, locks of hair, a heart—preserved by circles and then sometimes circulating more widely, often in tandem with bits of the literary corpus. Especially when it centers on the early deaths of Keats and Shelley, biographical interest tends to be dismissed as a largely Victorian and sentimental phenomenon that we should by now have put behind us. And yet a line of verse by these poets can still, willy-nilly, trigger associations with biographical detail in a way that sparks pathos and produces intimations of prolepsis or fatality, even in readers suspicious of such effects. Biographical fascination—the untoward and involuntary clinging of attention to the biographical subject—is thus “posthumous” in Keats’s evocative sense of the term, its life equivocally sustained beyond its period. This book takes seriously the biographical fascination that has dogged the posthumous lives of the prematurely arrested figures of Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge. Arising in tandem with a sense of the threatened end of poetry’s allotted period, biographical fascination opens us to poetry’s modes of survival from the time of the romantic period, when it began to receive the first of its many death sentences, into our own present.