Nearly 40 years ago, a book containing eight letters John Keats wrote to his fiancee Fanny Brawne disappeared. They resurfaced last year and, this week, returned to their rightful owner.
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
You’ll seldom read more romantic words than those the poet John Keats wrote to his neighbor and soon-to-be-fiancee Fanny Brawne.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “BRIGHT STAR”)
BEN WHISHAW: (As John Keats) I almost wish we were butterflies and lived but three summer days. Three such days with you I could fill with more delight than 50 common years could ever contain.
SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
That was Ben Whishaw playing Keats in the 2009 film “Bright Star,” about the relationship between the poet and Fanny Brawne. The words came from the first of nearly 40 letters Keats wrote to Brawne between 1819 and 1820.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “BRIGHT STAR”)
WHISHAW: (As John Keats) When you confess this in a letter, you must write immediately and do all you can to console me in it.
SUMMERS: That first letter, along with seven others, were bound into a book once held at the Long Island estate of the Whitney family. In the 1980s, those letters disappeared.
DETROW: They stayed missing until last year when a man attempted to sell the book to a rare bookstore in New York City. This week, after a long authentication process, the letters have been returned to their rightful owner. Keats’ fans and scholars are celebrating the find.
CATHERINE PAYLING: They are some of the finest love letters ever written.
SUMMERS: That’s Catherine Payling. She was the curator at the Keats-Shelley House in Rome for 15 years.
PAYLING: They are reflective of this youthful passion that he was feeling. They are timeless in the way that they convey a very pure love between young people.
SUMMERS: That love was ultimately doomed. About three years after meeting Fanny Brawne, Keats would die from tuberculosis.
DETROW: Brawne waited over 12 years to marry, and she held on to the letters until her death in 1865.
PAYLING: Unfulfilled love. You know, I think that’s an important part of the myth, that they never married. Their relationship was never consummated. So I think that that makes our sense of the emotion even more profound.
SUMMERS: John Keats was only 25 years old when he died. Catherine Payling says, though he’s one of the most important writers in the English language, Keats didn’t live to see his reputation flourish.
PAYLING: The lines that he wanted written on his gravestone – here lies one whose name was writ in water – tell us very clearly that he had no hopes that his work would be remembered.
DETROW: Luckily, Keats was wrong on that front. We have his poems and his letters to show for it.
(SOUNDBITE OF JOHAN AHLEN’S PERFORMANCE OF DEBUSSY’S “TWO ARABESQUES, L. 66: I. ANDANTINO CON MOTO”)
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