
3) the truth about the relationship between Fanny and Keats is too complicated to portray accurately. Certainly Fanny was not as "deep" as Keats but who was? Did Keats feel a mature love for Fanny? He was never comfortable around women anyway, and it would seem that his love for her was rather obsessive. His letters to her are overdone- someone who is trying too hard. The bottom line is that Keats was much more comfortable with love as an imaginative reality rather than an experience.
Who was Fanny? A tart, a socialite, or just a woman with a nice personality and average looks?
After Keats died she wrote some heartfelt things to Keats sister about that loss, but beyond that little is said by her. She kept Keats letters secret from her husband and her kids cashed in when the letters were revealed and auctioned. Did she keep them as remembrances, for their literary importance, or as largess for herself and her kids?
Who knows. Fanny, as she aged, was said to become matronly. How would Keats have dealt with aging; particularly the aging of the mythic "fatal woman" who will not stay young?
How would the poet of "La Belle Dame" dealt with a real relationship with a woman over a long stretch? Keats himself stated that he never wanted to marry.
How would a poet who seemed to spend his life in pursuit of mythic Goddess material have lived with a real woman?
Keats poetry has still not been plumbed to its depths. It is dense, beautiful, dark, mortal and immortal.
I'm currently reading a bio of Fanny Brawne, and from the excerpts included from her letters to Fanny Keats, she seems far from being a "tart" or "socialite".
She wrote of Keats to his sister that he was "formed for every thing good, and, I think I dare say it, for every thing great."
She said in her letter to Fanny Keats that the Christmas she had spent with Keats 3 years prior was the happiest day of her life, and expressed much pain over having lost him
My interest in Keats is intense and visceral. I am fascinated by his likely unconscious compulsion to bring the Goddess back into the world, and the subtle and powerful way he consummated this in "To Autumn".
For me there is a mythic cycle in his poetry, something mysterious in the way he works out "straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness", that is so full of the basic human dilemma, if one has any interiority, of being full of both darkness and light, mortal and immortal nature
Richardson describes Lindon as being no more than twenty when they first met, and that he had a "strong interest and perhaps ability in the arts, and he showed not only those merits of his own which must have been exceptional, but a little of that ardent character which she had ever loved. He offered her, in her thirties, the youthfulness which had vanished so long from her life, and it seemed a return to her early day sat Elm Cottage and Wentworth Place, when she had known the warm affection of her family, the companionship and eager love of the gifted and the young."
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