3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

This course will take John Keats’ poems and letter as a guide to London in the 1810’s; from the anatomy theaters of the hospitals where he trained, to the raucous parties and poetry slams of his radical literary friends; from museums and theaters to brothels and sickrooms. Keats’ intensely sensual poems are at once bookish and attuned to his environment: they provide lessons on how to abide in a large urban center. For his writing is intensely urban, even when it ventures far from the gloom of the metropolis. Reading the letters he wrote to his brother on the (then-) frontier in Kentucky, we can find yet another key to how he shaped London. We will look at maps of the city, see where the new housing developments were being constructed as old buildings were torn down, visit the jail where his friend, Leigh Hunt, was incarcerated for ridiculing the Prince Regent, see the theater posters and pamphlets Keats saw, as well as the parks and squares he could not enter. The goal for this course is to learn about Keats’ work, but also to try to reconstruct how his city looked and sounded and felt and what, finally, it meant to the poet. Ideally, the course will collectively create a digitized map of Keats’s London that serves as well as a guide to his poems.