In Writing: Keats and Fanny Brawne's Relationship Reimagined

This talk highlights the literary – rather than the romantic – relationship between John Keats and Fanny Brawne. Using close analysis of poems, letters, and other ephemera, Kit Freeman, a PhD candidate from Southern Methodist University, argues that we might reconsider Keats and Brawne as collaborative partners rather than as the traditional poet-muse.

According to Keats, the ‘truest’ poetical creation resides in an all-embracing receptivity, which results in seamless assumption and absorption of other identities through the imagination.

Kit will proffer as to why scholars do not study Keats as a poet whose nature was inherently collaborative, one who assumes identities of others?

Kit seeks to redefine the term ‘collaboration', and argue poems written in the last few years of Keats’s life are worth our time because they provide a more nuanced understanding of ‘collaboration’ due to Fanny’s nature as Keats’s amanuensis and muse.