Connection, consolation, and the power of distance in the letters of John Keats

This essay examines how the cultures and forms of letter writing, specifically the practice of sending letters over long distances, allow Keats to generate a unique form of consolation when faced with tragedy. In some letters, distance is a problem Keats must overcome through the shared act of correspondence. When Keats writes across the Atlantic to communicate the news of Tom’s death to George and Georgiana, the distance between Keats and his recipients works to offset the immediacy of grief through the temporal dislocation that takes place between the sending and receiving of a long-distance letter. Conversely, sharing letters over very short distances, as Keats does with Fanny Brawne while he is confined to his half of Wentworth Place, comes to exacerbate his suffering precisely because of the lack of distance between sender and recipient. Keats’s sensitive and self-conscious engagement with distance is played out in the letters he writes while dealing with the aftermath, and threat, of death.