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[ Culture ] An 1817 water- color portrait of George Keats. A Keatsian Connection By Thomson Smillie An Englishman driven by an American dream, George Keats left London and his soon-to-be- famous brother behind for imagined (and, for a time, real) riches in faraway Kentucky. "But be careful of those Americans. . . . Tose Americans will, I am afraid, fleece you." — English poet John Keats to his brother George in 1819 A piece of Louisville trivia developed into a minor obsession for me: Why is the younger brother of the most ethereal of all the romantic poets, the short- lived John Keats, buried in Louisville's Cave Hill Cemetery? In other words, what is the connection between the cramped small room beside Rome's Spanish Steps, where the poet expired painfully and in poverty in 1821, and the "western" U.S. frontier town, just emerg- ing into entrepreneurial prosperity, where George Keats made and lost fortunes while playing a major role in developing Louisville from a rough-hewn town into an important industrial and cultural city? Te answer lies in a conflict between independence and loyalty. Time was when every British schoolboy knew the story of the four orphaned Keats siblings — John, George, Tom and Fanny — raised as wards of a legal guardian after their father died in 1804 (John, the oldest, was eight) and their mother succumbed to tuberculosis in 1810. Two of the children also would lose their lives to the infectious lung disease commonly known as consumption, which in pre-antibacterial days was a sure death sentence. Youngest brother Tom died of it at 19 in 1818; John made it to 1821, reaching age 25. And George was felled by what some suspected to be gastrointestinal TB at 44 in Louisville in 1841, his body buried first at Western Cemetery on Jefferson Street [42] LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 11.12 between 15th and 18th and then moved to Cave Hill in 1879. George Keats had come from England to Kentucky with his new wife Georgiana to seek business opportunities in the summer of 1818, according to the Encyclopedia of Louisville, by which time John's epic poem "Endymion" had been published and Tom was in constant convalescence. (He would die in December.) "George is in America and I have no brother left," John lamented to an acquaintance. Tree years earlier, in the poem "To My Brother George," John wrote: "As to my sonnets, though no one else should heed them/I feel delighted, still, that you should read them." Te newlyweds first arrived in Henderson, Ky., staying with the family of the not-yet- famous naturalist John James Audubon, who wasted no time recruiting Keats to invest in a steamboat Audubon said he owned but couldn't show Keats because it was 700 miles away. Long story short: Te boat, in the hands of a scalawag who had absconded to New Orleans, never came back, and Audubon had paid some of his many debts with Keats' money. Angry and broke, without the savings he and his wife had arrived with, the couple relocated to Louisville in 1819, the year of a nationwide financial panic. In two July 1819 letters to John (which the poet didn't receive until mid-September, owing to transatlantic mail speed back then), George laid out his financial woes, to which his brother replied in his late-September dispatch, "Your wants will be a fresh spur to me. I assure you you shall more than share what I can get whilst I am still young; the time may come when age will make me more selfish." It was an ironic twist: George had set out for America to become the family benefactor. John composed at a feverish clip that year, writing poem after poem, including his famous odes — to Psyche, on a Grecian Urn ("Beauty is truth, truth beauty . . ."), on Indolence, on Melancholy, to a Nightingale, to Autumn. When I was in high school, the English master, Mr. Watterson, made a remark worthy of Robin Williams in the movie Dead Poets Society about a line in "To Autumn." He said: "If I could have written that one line — "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness" — and died the next minute, I would feel I had not lived in vain." I think that impressed the beginnings of a love of poetry in our adolescent minds more than anything else heard at school or university. But of course John's writing earned him nothing in his lifetime, and his idea that he could salvage the fortunes of all his family through poetry looks pathetic in retrospect. As a later great poet, Robert Graves, would write: "Tere is no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either." In the September letter, the poet also brought up his "blue devils" — his periods of deep melancholy, dealt with back then as a physical malady for which calomel, a mercury compound, was used as a purgative to expel "impurities" in the body (just as the also damaging practice of bleeding a patient was supposed to do) — and John even brought up the notion of emigrating. "You will perceive that it is quite out of my interest to come to America," he wrote George. "What could I do there? How could I employ myself out of the reach of libraries?" John didn't mention it, but