ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that through the haunting of Joseph Severn, John Keats kept returning to, kept haunting, Victorian culture–haunting it like no other poet of the Romantic period, not even that other Romantic poet cut off in his prime, Percy Bysshe Shelley. The poet is responding to information or circumstances that can only have come through Joseph Severn. The chapter shows that Keats’s Victorian inheritance more generally is bound up with a sense of the poet’s ghostly presence. Keats died, Severn suggests, because he was living before his time, because he was searching for a world that was ‘not ready for him’. Poem after poem written after Keats’s death and particularly in the second half of the nineteenth century recalls and responds to Keats in ways that in fact necessarily involve Severn.
