If the poet John Keats—fresh, fainting, convulsed by illness for much of his short life—could speak to us from beyond the grave, what would he say? More to the point, how would he say it? Keats didn’t speak like his fancier contemporaries, the poets Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. He spoke like the son of an innkeeper, and like a man who had trained as a surgeon and an apothecary, which is what he was. Speech patterns, like shoddy shoes and buckteeth, are classic fodder for schoolyard bullies, and Keats was not spared. In 1818, after the publication of his poem “Endymion” (“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever”), he was derided as a low-class poet who expressed “the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language.” He was criticized for his background and his education, and also for his perceived vulgarity and his “Cockney rhymes.” One critic, writing in the influential magazine Blackwood’s, was famously harsh: “It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr. John, back to the ‘plasters, pills, and ointment boxes.’ ” He added, “But, for Heaven’s sake, young Sangrado, be a little more sparing of extenuatives and soporifics in your practice than you have been in your poetry.” Zing!
No one likes a bad review, but these attacks felt personal. “Cockney” was a moral judgment as well as a literary one, as Keats’s biographer Andrew Motion has pointed out. Keats did his best to pretend that he didn’t care, writing, in a letter to a friend, “Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own Works.” (One to add to your morning affirmations.) But much of literary society didn’t believe him. After his early death, at twenty-five, many in his circle pointed to the Blackwood’s review as a turning point in his deteriorating health. After the article, “Poor Keats was thrown into a dreadful state,” Shelley wrote. “The agony of his sufferings at length produced the rupture of a blood vessel in the lungs.” Byron wove Keats’s death into his epic, Don Juan. “John Keats, who was kill’d off by one critique,” he wrote. “Poor fellow! His was an untoward fate / ’Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle, / Should let itself be snuff’d out by an article.”
It wasn’t really the article that killed Keats—he died of tuberculosis, which he probably picked up from nursing his brother Tom—but it didn’t help. Motion describes Keats at the end of his life as increasingly depressed and fixated on his critics. On the advice of his doctors, he had travelled to Italy, by boat, in search of a milder climate. (The journey there was disastrous: an outbreak of typhus in England meant that Keats was forced to quarantine for ten days on a small, crowded vessel.) In Rome, Keats holed up in a rented room at the base of the Spanish Steps. He was put on a starvation diet of bread and anchovies, and told to relax. It upset him to read, or to write a letter. “I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence,” he told a friend. When he died, a few months later, he was buried under words meant to excoriate his detractors. “This grave contains all that was mortal, of a young English poet,” his headstone reads, “who, on his death bed, in the bitterness of his heart, at the malicious power of his enemies, desired these words to be engraven on his tomb stone. Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”
The question of how Keats spoke when he was up and about—strolling Hampstead Heath with Coleridge, pestering Wordsworth in the Lake District—was recently raised by the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association, in Rome, which now occupies the house at 26 Piazza di Spagna, where Keats died. The foundation, like other Keats organizations this year, has planned a series of events to commemorate the two-hundredth anniversary of the poet’s death. (Shelley, who drowned, in 1822, with a book of Keats’s poetry in his pocket, will be honored in the coming year.) The association contacted Roger Michel, the head of the Institute for Digital Archeology, who suggested creating a C.G.I. rendering of Keats for the occasion. The digital Keats would recite his poem “Bright Star” against a backdrop of the room where he spent his last days. There was another advantage, as well. The poet’s tombstone has his death date wrong: Keats died on February 23rd, not February 24th, as the grave says. “No one knows why that is,” Michel said. Bringing him back to life digitally, he explained, would “give Keats back his extra day.”
Piecing together Keats’s accent fell to Ranjan Sen, a historical linguist at the University of Sheffield with an expertise in the eighteenth-century pronouncing dictionaries that would have been influential in Keats’s day. “One of the hallmarks of poetry is conveying meaning and beyond through its sounds, the rhythm of the sounds involved, the resonance of the vowels, the sort of puckers and percussive plosives, the lilting liquid,” Sen told me. With Keats, “it’s a matter of following the bread crumbs.” The dictionaries “give us a huge amount of evidence as a starting point,” he said. A further clue, that Keats was denounced as a Cockney poet, “leads us to ask: What was Cockney pronunciation in the eighteen-hundreds? And was Keats really particularly Cockney?”
Keats wouldn’t have been crudely dropping the letter “H” from words like “hello” (“almost certainly not,” Sen said) and T-glottaling, when the “T” is softened in words like “cat” and “mat”—that wasn’t around yet (“much more recent”). But he did have the Cockney habit of not pronouncing “R”s at the end of words. Looking at his poems, Sen found that Keats rhymed words like “fawn” and “thorn,” a faux pas for the upper classes of the time. “He would have known he would have come into a lot of criticism for doing something like this. It is precisely this sort of thing that he got criticized for,” Sen said, admiringly. It suggests that “he’s a poet proud to be of his time, linguistically speaking, not backwards-looking.”
When Keats died, he left behind several plaster masks taken of his face while he was alive, and one gaunt and pointed death mask. Alexy Karenowska, a physicist at the University of Oxford and the Institute’s director of technology, took detailed photographic studies of the masks to create a “digital simulacrum” of the poet’s face. She used portraits made during his lifetime—Keats gazing dreamily out the window, or sighing heavily into his hand—to fill in the missing details. Some parts were more difficult than others: the “fleshy part of the face”; his unruly, “faintly angelic” hair (“quite challenging”). “We know what shape his nose was, but how fleshy was his nose?” Karenowska said. “Was it a sort of boney nose, or a not-so-boney nose?”
On the night of the resuscitation, Karenowska led a discussion about Keats on Zoom. Scarlett Sabet, a London-based poet with long, pre-Raphaelite hair, read from a poem she had written, which ends with a reflection on Keats’s death mask. (“I trace your eyelids’ delicate crease / wondering at the imprint your lips leave.”) Simon Armitage, the U.K.’s poet laureate, read from his own Keats-inspired poem, and Iain Harvie, the Scottish musician, read Keats’s melancholic poem “On Visiting the Tomb of Burns.”
Finally, it was Keats’s turn to speak. The screen filled with footage of the narrow Roman room where he spent his last hours: high ceilings, terra-cotta floors, a wooden display case. Jenny Lister, a fashion and textiles curator from the Victoria and Albert Museum, in London, had advised on his clothing (open-collared white shirt; no-fuss tan trousers), and Sen had worked with an actor to record his voice. Keats was settled on a bed, one arm draped casually over his knee, his hair a little wonky. He paused before starting, as if gathering his thoughts. When he spoke, his vowels were softer and more rounded than I expected. His voice was full of longing. He swayed slightly as he recited the last words of “Bright Star”: “Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, / And so live ever—or else swoon to death.”
