John Keats's Letters to Fanny Brawne, March 1820
How horrid was the chance of slipping into the ground instead of into your arms—the difference is amazing, Love … Let me have another opportunity of years before me and I will not die without being remember’d.
—John Keats, March 1820
Poetic immortality is the sweetest ecstasy. It is the most intoxicating fantasy. It is to throw one’s self into the arms of Morpheus and succumb to the hypnotic soporific where “gleams of a remoter world visit the soul in sleep”, where one converses with voices of another universe, a “harmonious communication with some other inspired being” whispering secrets of spirits. It is a potent dream-potion, a “draught of vintage”, a Coleridgean Black Drop that “makes one drunk at once” and sober nevermore. It is enchantment. It is torture. It is a love-charm of precious poison. The most perfect illusion, a profound self-delusion. The idea of being remembered is beautiful madness. And because of this eternal remembrance, this poetic immortality, the poets who were cheated of life can now never die, and therefore perhaps they were never really born at all. They are all spirits floating forever in the æther, and how I long to join them.
To deceive oneself is pointless. All is vanity. Happy is he who was never born. Death is better than life; one must free oneself from it.
Is it an inner sickness to desire to be remembered for the outpourings of artistic inspiration? I am starting to believe, to truly believe, that the answer to that question is an indisputable yes. Almost every day during the past year I have asked myself if I had made the right decision to leave a financially stable career in consulting, followed by the same question with regard to leaving the most prosaic career within federal government. I then ask myself the same questions posed in a different way, followed by what most people who self-identify as normal would consider a ridiculous one: Would I rather be a well-paid knave working 90+ hours a week with no time for anything else, a nameless suit in the highest realms of government with a disingenuous identity based on chicanery and emetic deference, or would I rather die young and miserable but be remembered for poetry?
And then, what happens to everyone stricken with a fatal inner disease happened to me. At first minor signs of indisposition appear, which the sick person ignores; then these symptoms appear more and more frequently, merging into one interrupted period of suffering. The suffering increases and before the sick man realizes what is happening he discovers that the thing he had taken for an indisposition is in fact the thing that is more important to him than anything in the world: it is death.
Never once have I faltered in answering this three-part question. Not once. Not even in my happiest moments (rare indeed) nor in my most hopeful have I hesitated in beholding the truth within my own heart. I dare say that if I ever glimpsed the slightest hint of poetic immortality from death, then I would gladly take a sweet poison from a lover’s lips and discover the truth through undiscovered universes. Even if that immortality was achieved with a single poem—yes, if only one poem made me remembered—then I would willingly die young and alone.
Death weighs heavily upon my mind. My broodings on death have never been mercurial or inconstant, but the past month I have thought of little else: Keats hemorrhaged the blood of his “death-warrant” 200 years ago in February, which is something I have been thinking about deeply; this essay is inspired by Keats’s March 1820 love letters to Fanny Brawne which are full of death-talk (Keats knew his death was imminent); today is the anniversary of the death of my dear Beethoven; and the current Plague of 2020 (coronavirus, or COVID-19) has been ravaging the entire planet. Yes, death weighs heavily upon my mind, as it does for everyone right now in these unbelievable times.
My spirit is too weak—mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagined pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.
It is this Plague of 2020 (a term not at all meant to be humorous) that has once again forced me to seriously ponder my own mortality and the transience of all life. It has already infected hundreds of thousands worldwide, killing tens of thousands of poor souls. This plague affects everyone differently, but if I were to succumb to it (a possibility that everyone needs to consider), I ask myself what have I accomplished with my life? What have I achieved? What will I be remembered for? Just like the answer to my three-part question above, the answer to these three has never faltered: Nothing. I have accomplished and achieved absolutely nothing; I will be remembered for nothing.
Today or tomorrow sickness and death will come (and they had already arrived) to those dear to me, and to myself, and nothing will remain other than the stench and the worms. Sooner or later my deeds, whatever they may have been, will be forgotten and will no longer exist.
Sure, I have written some poems in moments of intense inspiration that I am fond of, a few poems in drunken ecstasy that are tolerable, a couple unfinished novels that I am somewhat happy with but require much more work, and several mediocre short stories that I need to significantly alter or burn. But none of these writings are immortal (a laughable thought), and none of my poetry would allow my ghost even the slightest taste of that sweetest ecstasy. I am reminded—as I am always reminded thanks to my inner sickness and desire for immortal remembrance—of what Keats wrote to Fanny Brawne in February of 1820, exactly two hundred years ago just last month:
‘“If I should die,” said I to myself, “I have left no immortal work behind me—nothing to make my friends proud of my memory—but I have lov’d the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember’d.”’
Keats would return to these sentiments of tristesse and melancholy just a month later in a letter again addressed to his beloved, which is the very letter that inspired this essay—see both the epigraph above and the ending letter below. Like any artist, Keats wanted to be remembered for his art after his death, which he now knew would take him in his youth, and possibly quite soon. If we are to believe his good friend Charles Brown’s account of 3 February 1820, then we are to believe a moment in literary history when possibly the greatest and most inspired poet who ever lived realized the very moment that he was touched by Death and taken before he ever reached full poetic bloom. According to Brown, Keats was feverish when he entered Wentworth Place in Hampstead, now rightfully known as Keats House. After Keats coughed blood upon his “cold sheets” before lying down to sleep, Brown recorded the following scene:
“‘Bring me the candle, Brown; and let me see this blood.’ After regarding it steadfastly, he looked up in my face, with a calmness of countenance that I can never forget, and said,—‘I know the colour of that blood;—it is arterial blood;—I cannot be deceived in that colour;—that drop of blood is my death-warrant;—I must die.’”
I must die. We all must die, so why does this break my heart? Keats, only 24 years of age in February of 1820, had so much more to do, so much more to accomplish, so much more to write, so much more poetic inspiration to be consumed by, and so much more love to give to his beloved Fanny Brawne—one need only to read his love letters to her to hear the voices of ecstasy boiling in his still living blood, not to mention his mania to be remembered once it had turned cold “in the icy silence of the tomb”. And here I am, a few years or so past 24 years of age, a profound loner and expert social distancer, especially during this pandemic of COVID-19, not at all impassioned by love nor inspired to write love letters, and an absolute failure when it comes to my own poetry and writing. And yet I live, and Keats did not. And yet I continue to prolong my life, and Keats died. Why? Why do I live when it is possible for me not to live?
If a magician had come and offered to grant my wishes I would not have known what to say. If in my intoxicated moments I still had the habit of desire, rather than real desire, in my sober moments I knew that it was a delusion and that I wanted nothing. I did not even wish to know the truth because I had guessed what it was. The truth was that life is meaningless.
The answer to such questions is insignificant and meaningless, as is my life. However, what is significant and meaningful in my life during this Plague of 2020 is caring for family, taking care of elderly and vulnerable loved ones, and doing the best I can to support friends in their time of suffering. Thus, in recent weeks I have passionately followed the mimetic patterns of a profound loner and self-isolator—even more than usual, and without the visionary metamorphosis from a recluse’s epiphany. I have never been one to exude jaunty optimism or bonhomie, nor am I the most social of creatures (I am not gauche, but, like Keats, I am not fond of crowds), but my intense self-isolation for the benefit of others has darkened my own darkness. “Dark have been my dreams of late”, wrote Tolkien, but I do not “feel as one new-awakened”.
Not only do I not feel newly awakened, but I feel as if I haven’t awakened at all. Proper sleep has been almost impossible these last few weeks, and the strange visions I have imagined and perhaps fantasized have not been dreams—calling these sleepless visions nightmares would be, besides entirely inaccurate, simply too light of a description. I certainly hope that I am not showing symptoms of plague, but these night-visions feel more like feverish phantasmagorias than dreams or nightmares, magic-lantern phantasies of the conscious mind unconsciously summoned for self-possession invariably leading to self-eclipse—something akin to waking absinthe dreams after an evening of poetry and Ken Russell’s Gothic, brilliant and lucid if the sleep is timed properly.
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?
Appropriately, both to these plague-like times of ἡ λοιμώδης νόσος or λοιμὸς ἔχθιστος (roughly translated as “the pestilential disease” and “most abominable plague”, respectively—writing out COVID-19 is becoming tiresome and I wanted to add a bit of Shelleyan classicism) and to the inspiration behind this essay, my dear Keats was also writing of phantasmagorias 200 years ago. In a letter to Fanny Brawne from March 1820, Keats writes:
“I rest well and from last night do not remember anything horrid in my dream, which is a capital symptom, for any organic derangement always occasions a Phantasmagoria.”
[A phantasmagoria magic lantern slide of a scene from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” by Joseph Boggs Beale (1841–1926)]
That “organic derangement” was, of course, consumption (tuberculosis) and Keats had been suffering severely from it since that fateful night of 3 February 1820 described above—although symptoms can be traced back to 1818, possibly even earlier. And although Keats in his letter to Fanny describes not remembering any sort of nightmare (or fevered phantasmagoria), he certainly does remember one that occurred during the first week after his lung hemorrhage or hemoptysis. In a letter to his friend Charles Dilke written 4 March 1820, Keats somewhat funnily writes:
“Brown has been mightily progressing with his Hogarth. A damn’d melancholy picture it is, and during the first week of my illness it gave me a psalm-singing nightmare that made me almost faint away in my sleep. I know I am better now, for I can bear the Picture.”
Besides Keats’s consumptive nightmares and my own phantasmagorias (probably just self-isolated madness), I am reminded of some recent reading with regard to Humphry Davy who nearly killed himself several times while experimenting with copious inhalations of nitrous oxide. Like Mary & Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, Goethe, and even John Keats, Humphry Davy was part of an entire generation of “Romantic wanderers”. In the third Dialogue of his brilliant Consolations in Travel, or The Last Days of a Philosopher (1830), a work of genius on his thoughts of science, philosophy, and poetry, his writing shifts “intriguingly into a discussion of ghosts, visions and nightmares” which, according to Richard Holmes, “seem to reflect the horrors of Davy’s own illness [possibly brought on by inhalations of various gases throughout his life], such as the dream of a group of murderous robbers breaking silently into his bedroom, and one of them ‘actually putting his hand before my mouth to ascertain if I was sleeping naturally’”. Davy’s brother John would later say that his brother’s “most painful and irrational obsession” in the last months of his life was the fear of being buried alive. This fear of being buried alive, known as taphophobia, was prevalent before the age of modern medicine and it was not an unreasonable fear to have. There have been many cases of people being accidently buried alive throughout history—and no doubt many cases of it undocumented and unknown.
To be buried while alive is, beyond question, the most terrific of these extremes which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality. That it has frequently, very frequently, so fallen will scarcely be denied by those who think. The boundaries which divide Life from Death, are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins? … My fancy grew charnel. I talked “of worms, of tombs and epitaphs.” I was lost in reveries of death, and the idea of premature burial held continual possession of my brain. The ghastly Danger to which I was subjected, haunted me day and night. In the former, the torture of meditation was excessive—in the latter, supreme. When the grim Darkness overspread the Earth, then, with every horror of thought, I shook—shook as the quivering plumes upon the hearse. When Nature could endure wakefulness no longer, it was with a struggle that I consented to sleep—for I shuddered to reflect that, upon awaking, I might find myself the tenant of a grave. And when, finally, I sank into slumber, it was only to rush at once into a world of phantasms, above which, with vast, sable, overshadowing wing, hovered, predominant, the one sepulchral Idea.
[Illustration for Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Premature Burial” by Harry Clarke (1889–1931)]
Returning to Keats and his own illness, consumption can cause profound night-sweats and fevered phantasmagorias. So can COVID-19. As much as I have thought about Keats over the last several years and the infectious disease that took his life at so young an age, before he could realize his full potential as a poet and writer, I never once imagined that, quite literally 200 years to the month, we (the entire world) would be facing a similar infectious disease pandemic—identical symptoms of chronic cough (bloody with consumption, dry with COVID-19), extreme fever and the dreams and nightmares that accompany it, chest pain, chills, and delirious night-sweats.
I know that I cannot be the only one brooding over such strange times, nor can I be the only one comparing it to such profound poetic and literary history—after all, how many great writers and artists have died from consumption throughout the centuries before a cure was found? John Keats, exactly 200 years ago as I write this, was suffering and slowly dying from an incurable disease that consumed the lungs. And here we are, exactly 200 years later, suffering and dying from another incurable disease that essentially consumes the lungs, among other ailments. Sure, within 12-18 months we will have a cure and vaccine, but right now as I write this we do not, and thousands of people are dying by the day. In another letter to his beloved in March of 1820, and with respect to the disease consuming him, Keats writes:
“In consequence of our company I suppose I shall not see you before tomorrow. I am much better today; indeed, all I have to complain of is want of strength and a little tightness in the Chest.”
Does this sound familiar during our own Plague of 2020? Yes, it absolutely does. In another letter, this time to his sister Fanny dated 1 April 1820, Keats writes again of his symptoms:
“I am getting better every day and should think myself quite well were I not reminded every now and then by faintness and a tightness in the Chest.”
Knowing what I know, what we all know, it pains me to read that he believed himself getting better—Keats would die less than a year later in Rome. It is quite possible, of course, that he was just staying positive and hopeful for his sister’s sake, but who can really say? Although there was indeed evidence Keats’s health was improving in April, in my opinion, as I wrote about in my last bicentennial essay, I believe Keats knew he was destined to die, that his “death-warrant” was true, and that he was not getting better—not only did he nurse his younger brother Tom through his final torturous weeks of consumption, his medical knowledge alone told him there was no cure. I am not quite sure that he felt this hopeless in March or April of 1820 (I think he still had hope for Life & Love), but, in my opinion, he certainly believed his death was inexorable later in the year before he boarded the Maria Crowther destined for Italy. He knew that he would never return to his beloved Fanny Brawne.
I am tormented day and night. They talk of my going to Italy. ‘Tis certain I shall never recover if I am to be so long separate from you … the air I breathe in a room empty of you is unhealthy.
I wish for death every day and night to deliver me from these pains, and then I wish death away, for death would destroy even those pains which are better than nothing … The thought of leaving Miss Brawne is beyond everything horrible—the sense of darkness coming over me—I eternally see her figure eternally vanishing. Some of the phrases she was in the habit of using during my last nursing at Wentworth Place ring in my ears. Is there another life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be, we cannot be created for this sort of suffering.
It also seems, and I am basing this on my own experience during this forced self-isolation and prison-like quarantine, that Keats was going a bit mad and stir-crazy from being cooped up indoors—being severely ill and brooding on little else but Love & Death certainly did not help. The weather in March of 1820 was not particularly pleasant, as Keats unhappily declares in several letters, including one in which he mentions receiving a note from the poet B.W. Proctor (better known under his nom de plume of Barry Cornwall) and how he was unable to “pay [Keats] a visit [in] this weather as he is fearful of an inflammation in the Chest”. Digressing for just a moment, and returning to the spirit of poetic immortality, besides scholars and obsessives, and perhaps lovers of Pushkin, does anyone reading this recognize the name Barry Cornwall? I imagine most answers will be an emphatic no.
Within the same letter, addressed to his beloved, Keats goes on to describe a “horrible climate” and “careless inhabitants”, and entreats Fanny to take the cold weather seriously and not to expose herself to it. Does this, too, sound familiar during our own time of plague? When Keats writes “careless inhabitants” I cannot help but think of the selfish masses of rabble and simple-minded knaves who do not take social distancing seriously and, either out of their own unconcern for the well-being of others or believing the disease to be some sort of hoax, carry on as usual and gather en masse to celebrate their own stupidity and transient existence—not only are plaguish diseases such as COVID-19 highly contagious, but so are stupidity and ignorance.
But to the point of Keats going a bit stir-crazy and mad from being quarantined indoors due to his illness and the cold weather that March, there is another letter he writes to his beloved that month. Not only do I find it beautiful, as I do most of his love letters to Franny Brawne, but I also find it a bit manic, slightly unbalanced, and full of feverish passions from an inspired spirit quarantined indoors window-haunting his sick-room. In another letter from March of 1820 addressed to his beloved, Keats writes:
“You fear, sometimes, I do not love you so much as you wish? My dear Girl I love you ever and ever and without reserve. The more I have known you the more have I lov’d. In every way—even my jealousies have been agonies of Love, in the hottest fit I ever had I would have died for you. I have vex’d you too much. But for Love! Can I help it? You are always new. The last of your kisses was ever the sweetest; the last smile the brightest; the last moment the gracefullest. When you pass’d my window home yesterday, I was fill’d with as much admiration as if I had then seen you for the first time … No ill prospect has been able to turn your thoughts a moment from me. This perhaps should be as much a subject of sorrow as joy—but I will not talk of that. Even if you did not love me I could not help an entire devotion to you: how much more deeply then must I feel for you knowing you love me. My Mind has been the most discontented and restless one that ever was put into a body too small for it. I never felt my Mind repose upon anything with complete and undistracted enjoyment—upon no person but you.”
Love & Death. These are the manic passions that consumed poor Keats in March of 1820, and the very same that continued to haunt his every thought for the rest of his short life until his heartbreaking death in Rome less than a year later in February of 1821. As the year progressed his letters to Fanny would become even more manic, distrusting, accusatory, paranoid, filled with more “jealousies” and “agonies of Love”. These were letters written by a once inspired being now struggling with the maddening prospect of approaching Night and the “sense of darkness coming over [him]”, the obliteration of Death who was “the great divorcer for ever”. And although Keats’s health seemed to be improving daily by April, I believe he was already living his “posthumous existence”—poignantly, this immortal phrase on mortality was coined by Keats in the last letter he ever wrote just months later in November.
I have an habitual feeling of my real life having passed, and that I am leading a posthumous existence. Although I have read this sentence many times, sometimes in despair, sometimes obsessively, it still breaks me. Rereading it tonight has left me broken-hearted, soul-crushed, inconsolable, empty. Perhaps it is because the bicentennial anniversary of this excruciatingly moving letter, Keats’s last letter, is nearly upon us. Last letter. The finality of this realization is almost unbearable. His letters have been a part of my despairing spirit since 2016, reading them faithfully on each bicentennial date, writing about them in journal entries, and the overwhelming thought that this is about to come to an abrupt end in November feels as though I am about to lose a best friend. Perhaps even an only friend given my reclusive literary life these last few years in apparent pursuit of Poetry & poverty. And now, this coming 30th of November, a date I am looking toward with profound dread, it feels as if I will lose an inspired friend who died 200 years ago. It feels as if Keats is about to die for the first time. If I am feeling this way about the date of his last known letter, I cannot even begin to fathom the emotions that will consume me come 23 February 1821, the bicentennial of his actual death.
Unable to ever unremember
I thus discovered in my youth,
Through my macabre scenes of night-life,
An uneasy, yet necessary truth,—
For the shadow holds no secrets and
Whispers with a cold and quiet breath—
And it is this: There is Beauty even in Death.
And yet, with tears in my eyes, I know a most beautiful truth: Keats can never die. He is poetic immortality personified. His brilliant life is captured in a moonbeam, a night-spirit of “silvery enchantment” between brightest darkness and darkest light, whispering mysteries borne upon the air like some “Eolian magic”, bird-song of both day and night, spring and autumn, summer serpents and winter ecstasies, enraptured by voices of another universe, an intoxicating reality that is eternal and everlasting. Not only did Keats taste of that sweetest ecstasy, he created it. He became it.
I breathe in its voice like cold influence,
Sweet as poison taken from a lover’s lips
Like a kiss of Tartarean luxury,
And, in a phantasm of voiceless ecstasy,
I become the apparition I came to seek.
And once more in the haunted Keatsian spirit of Love & Death, in another undated letter to his beloved Fanny Brawne in March of 1820, Keats writes:
“I fear I am too prudent for a dying kind of Lover. Yet, there is a great difference between going off in a warm blood like Romeo, and making one’s exit like a frog in a frost … Illness is a long lane, but I see you at the end of it, and shall mend my pace as well as possible.”
My last essay, written on the bicentennial of Keats’s brilliant 13 October 1819 letter to Fanny Brawne, ended in despair. I refuse to let this piece share a similar fate or allow it to make a tragic sort of exit. Besides, there is hope in Keats’s lines above, and a hope that is entirely relevant in our time of plague and suffering. What Keats may not have known is that, in such a bizarrely genius element of survival, some “frog[s] in a frost” can indeed freeze in winter, completely stop breathing with hearts no longer beating, and yet, come warmer weather from the warmth of spring, their frosted and icy bodies thaw, their hearts beat new rhythms of restoration, and they breathe life once again.
Whosoever is free from the contamination of [COVID-19] and [frozen self-isolation] may go forth to the fields and to the woods, inhaling joyous renovation from the breath of Spring.
There are several species of these deathless sort of frogs whose skills in springtime self-resurrection are positively occult, whose coldblooded veins course with antifreeze (a natural witches’ brew of concentrated glucose that prevents vital organs from freezing), including the spring peeper (Pseudaris crucifer) whose name I adore. However, the one I am thinking of and have read about recently is the wood frog (Rana sylvatica). In a way, we are all like the bewintered wood frog right now. Frozen in time in our prison-like quarantine, static and self-isolated from friends and family, broken, death-like, constant in our changelessness, miserable, utterly alone, and profoundly hopeless.
And yet, as unbearably alone as many of us may feel right now, there is profound hope. We may all be frozen in time right now, believing all is lost in our own self-misery and forced self-isolation, but, just like that brilliantly mysterious and almost Shelleyan sort of wood frog, we will overcome this, we will thaw out in the warmth of the godlike and Turneresque sunshine and be born again, live again, see with new-awakened eyes, and perhaps maybe, just maybe, delight in a new appreciation for life.
Once we're thrown off our habitual paths, we think all is lost; but it's only here that the new and the good begins. As long as there's life, there's happiness. There's much, much still to come.
And at long last, I believe it is most necessary to copy out in full a letter that Keats wrote to Fanny Brawne in March of 1820. This letter contains unforgettable passages that have profoundly inspired me over the years—these same lines have also profoundly broken my heart. It was written by a still brilliant poet whose love- and death-sick mind was filled with beautiful contradictions. On one hand Keats saw hope and life with his beloved Fanny Brawne. On the other he saw death imminent and looming, a force that could not be changed. And still more he was intoxicated by the thought of being remembered, those rhapsodies of euphoria, an ambitious artist’s fantasy, that beautiful madness that is poetic immortality—Keats’s sweetest ecstasy. And even more relevant, Keats was taking care of himself during this time, avoiding exertion and the cold weather that could worsen his fragile condition, entreating Fanny to do the same. Keats was looking forward to the prospect of restored health from finer weather, the end of his self-imposed imprisonment, and reuniting once again with his beloved in the warmth of summer. So should we all.
My dearest Fanny,
I slept well last night and am no worse this morning for it. Day by day if I am not deceived I get a more unrestrain'd use of my Chest. The nearer a racer gets to the Goal the more his anxiety becomes, so I lingering upon the borders of health feel my impatience increase. Perhaps on your account I have imagined my illness more serious than it is. How horrid was the chance of slipping into the ground instead of into your arms—the difference is amazing, Love—Death must come at last; Man must die, as Shallow says; but before that is my fate I feign would try what more pleasures than you have given so sweet a creature as you can give. Let me have another opportunity of years before me and I will not die without being remember'd. Take care of yourself, dear, that we may both be well in the Summer. I do not at all fatigue myself with writing, having merely to put a line or two here and there, a Task which would worry a stout state of the body and mind, but which just suits me as I can do no more.
Your affectionate
J.K—
NOTES & REFERENCES
As with my last bicentennial essay, this piece was never meant to be academic, and nor is it for I am offering no new insights into Keats’s life except for my own thoughts and musings based on his letters and the letters of his contemporaries. However, in anticipation of questions from curious friends, I will list my Keatsian sources below, including my recent readings of Tolstoy and others whose relevant passages I included lovingly as ghosted italics between paragraphs. Oddly, much of my recent readings, most of it written in the 19th century, were relevant with regard to Keats in March of 1820, my own life, and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.
John Keats, The Letters of John Keats: 1814-1821, 2 volumes, edited by Hyder Edward Rollins, (Cambridge University Press, 1958).
Aileen Ward, John Keats: The Making of a Poet (Viking Press, 1963).
Andrew Motion, Keats: A Biography (Faber & Faber, 1997).
Nicholas Roe, John Keats: A New Life (Yale University Press, 2012).
John Keats, John Keats: Complete Poems, edited by Jack Stillinger (Belknap Press, 1991).
Leo Tolstoy, A Confession and Other Religious Writings, translated by Jane Kentish (Penguin, 1987).
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Vintage, 2008).
Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (Harper Press, 2008).
Edgar Allan Poe, Complete Stories and Poems (Doubleday, 1966) [for full text of “The Premature Burial”, see The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, https://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/prebura.htm].
Homer, Iliad [looking over my Homeric plague notes this month led to an interesting article published last year in American Journal of Philology; see Pantelis Michelakis, “Naming the Plague in Homer, Sophocles, and Thucydides”, American Journal of Philology, Volume 140, Number 3, Fall 2019, Pages 381–414. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/ajp.2019.0025].
Hillas Smith, The Strange Case of Mr. Keats's Tuberculosis, Clinical Infectious Diseases, Volume 38, Issue 7, 1 April 2004, Pages 991–993, https://doi.org/10.1086/381980.
Jon P. Costanzo, M. Clara F. do Amaral, Andrew J. Rosendale, Richard E. Lee, Jr, “Hibernation Physiology, Freezing Adaptation and Extreme Freeze Tolerance in a Northern Population of the Wood Frog”, Journal of Experimental Biology, Volume 216, September 2013, Pages 3461–3473, doi:10.1242/jeb.089342.