ABSTRACT
Even while Severn was in Rome during Keats’s last days, he appears to have had half an eye to the future importance of the events he was witnessing and the need to record them. His letters to William Haslam or to Charles Brown, reporting on Keats’s progress, were passed among the friends of the circle and quickly became ‘a heavy narrative’ to be shared. Severn’s description of Keats’s last months in Rome was crucial for Keatsian biography. His letters from Rome, which gave the only account of Keats’s death, were reproduced or condensed and paraphrased by Monckton Milnes and by Buxton Forman, and, to a lesser extent, by Hunt and Charles Brown. The descriptions of Keats’s reaction to the oppressive theatre in Naples and to the uneatable food sent up to his sickbed from the trattoria at Piazza de Spagna, when he was still comparatively healthy, occur in no other versions and actually shed new light upon Keats’s political views.
