Keats's Killing Breath: Poetry and Theories of Consumption

Professor Damian Walford Davies (Cardiff University) explores what Keats knew about the family disease, how he imagined it and how these preoccupations helped him understand his place in the world.

The nature of Keats’s understanding of the disease that killed him – pulmonary tuberculosis – together with the range of conceptual paradigms that such knowledge (and its lack) prompted, have not been fully explored. This talk will explore what Keats knew about the disease, and how he imagined it; it also identifies in his poetry and letters complex moments of self-aware speculation concerning divergent contemporary theories of tuberculosis. What is proposed is that Keats’s work represents a clinically insightful and imaginatively exploratory contribution to medical debates concerning the aetiology – the causes – of the family disease. Further, it reveals how contemporary paradigms of tuberculosis presented Keats with highly serviceable, if always distressing, models that focused a range of preoccupations and anxieties such as inheritance and birthrights, individual poethood, imaginative engagement and fantasies of power. These paradigms helped him get a purchase on his biological and literary place in the world.