AnalysisArts & CultureEducationFeaturesGlobal IssuesHistoricalHumanityLiteratureMigrationMulticulturalismPoetryRefugeesSocietyWorldYoung Generation
Courageous quests: Keats, art and refugees
The great sensualist Romantic poet John Keats arrived in Rome in late 1820 with his friend, painter Joseph Severn
This was not to be a grand tour of Italy in the typical sense.
Fortune did not smile on Keats’s lungs or his bank balance; one year later he was dead.
Passionate letters from sweetheart Fanny Brawne lay unopened and were buried with him, as he requested, in the tranquil oasis of the English Cemetery in Rome.
How surprised young Keats would be to see his last home, a cheap rental in its day, become a dynamic museum, filled, not just with tourists and poetry lovers, but with artists and…
Some, like Rome-based art therapist Helen Creswell, consider Keats to have been both a health and an economic refugee.
The poet fled creditors and…