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he had recently experienced the first signs of tuberculosis. In January 1820, George, leaving his wife and new baby girl in Louisville, returned to England to see family and raise money for future U.S. ventures, receiving inheritance from his late grandmother's estate and the estate of Tom Keats. What he didn't know as he boarded the boat back was that tubercular hemorrhages in February and June of that year would require John to flee England for Italy's drier, sunny climate. In November the poet wrote his last letter. By the end of February 1821 he was dead. Like many cutting-edge writers, Keats was savaged by the press and died embittered, feeling his cultural legacy would die with him. Tis is evident from the epitaph he chose for his headstone, still a place of secular pilgrimage in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." (It was only after his smart career move of dying young that John Keats developed a posthumous legacy which, by the end of the 1800s, made him the most-loved and most- admired of the romantics. Oscar Wilde, self- styled "Apostle of Beauty," idolized Keats, of which more anon.) In Louisville, having achieved financial security but despondent with something akin to "survivor's guilt" George would blame himself for John's early death while writing to his sister in 1825: "I almost believe that if I had remained his companion, and had had the means, as I had the wish, to have devoted my life to his fame and happiness, he might have been living at this hour." Te key to understanding the brothers' relationship is in a pair of books, one published "Here we are not understood," Keats wrote. "Although we have connections, we have no genuine exercise of kindly feelings but between ourselves." last fall, the other due out this month. Te first is by Stanford University professor of English Denise Gigante, titled Te Keats Brothers: Te Life of John and George, which is scholarly, witty and shows a deep love and understanding of John's poetic pre-eminence in a period that included Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Blake. Te other book, George Keats of Kentucky, comes out this month from the University Press of Kentucky and is by Lawrence M. Crutcher, a descendant of Emma Keats Speed, a granddaughter of George Keats (and no known relation to the publisher of this magazine), who now lives in California. Gigante's is the more literary book while Crutcher's is more Louisville-focused, full of fascinating Louisville insights told with the relish of a good raconteur anxious to have you share, if possible, in the first-person thrill of being an early Louisvillian. It is also slavishly researched. I suspect that a few hundred Louisvillians, Lexingtonians and other less geographically blessed brethren, on reading Crutcher's book, will be able to boast descent from the greatest of romantic poets: people with names like Speed, Gwathmey, Peay and Ewing. George's early attempts to fit into Louisville society were unpromising: "Here we are not understood," he wrote. "Although we have connections, we have no genuine exercise of kindly feelings but between ourselves." Tat did not, however, dampen his entrepreneurial drive and his apparently madcap borrowing habits, which would fuel his commercial rise and bring about his downfall in the aftermath of the great Panic of 1837. A number of external factors propelled Keats' rise to financial eminence in Louisville: Prime was the chartering and construction of the Louisville and Portland Canal, which ensured Louisville's prosperity and population growth, recorded at 7,503 in 1826 and 20,768 four years later. "Te advent of the canal, the widest such cut engineered in America up to that time, changed www.kyoms.com 11.12 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE [43]