John Keats’s Death Mask

6 thoughts on “John Keats’s Death Mask”

1. Your picture is of Keats’s life mask by Benjamin Robert Haydon, cast when the poet was still as well as he could be (14-15 Dec.1817). For comparison of the life and death masks, study the contrast between your picture and that of the actual death mask on page 431 (illustration 49) of Robert Gittings’s biography, “John Keats.” There is also a photo of the life mask on the book’s frontispiece.

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   1. Several of the images I’ve posted under the heading X’s Death Mask are actually life masks (I’ve been trying to post one every Sunday for a few months now). I don’t really see any pressing need to distinguish between the two terms; life is a death sentence, after all.

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2. That may be true, Biblioklept, but I guarantee Keats would have preferred to enjoy what life had to offer for a few more years.

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   1. True. Poverty and TB must have been a blast.

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3. No shit, and add unfullfilled love AND despair at the belief of never achieving the fame he so deserved . . .
   “My only regret is if I die, I shall leave behind no immortal work — 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 the time, I would have made myself remember’d.”
   God, I love Keats.

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4. If you don’t understand that there is a huge visual and facts-based difference between Keats’ life and death masks, then you need not write a book claiming to have any authority…..

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