<\/p>\n
From the deceased\u2019s author\u2019s skull, we turn today to the deceased\u2019s author\u2019s hair. In 1855, in Godey\u2019s Lady\u2019s Book and Magazine<\/em>, English essayist and poet Leigh Hunt is recorded describing hair as \u2018the most delicate and lasting of all our materials\u2019. He continues<\/p>\n ‘It is so light, so gentle, so escaping from the idea of death that with a lock of hair belonging to a child or a friend, we may almost look up to heaven, and compare notes with the angelic native; may almost say, \u2018I have a piece of thee here, not unworthy of thy being now\u2019.<\/p>\n In Hunt\u2019s day, the hair of the dead would go immediately to intimates, lovers, family or close friends. When it came to the hair of long-dead famous writers, many, wanting to get their hands on the locks, would claim personal intimacy and affection, even when there had been no personal friendship. In a sense, obtaining the hair seemed to enable such a relationship. As Hunt put it, access to the hair of a celebrated figure could provide \u2018personal acquaintance with people who lived a hundred\u2026years ago\u2019 because \u2018we have touched <\/em>the persons we allude to.\u2019 Today I am seeking such \u2018personal acquaintance\u2019 with the poet John Keats, by going in search of his own glossy tresses. I use the word glossy with good authority here: according to Hunt in 1833, Keats had \u2018a kind of ideal, poetical hair\u2019, which was \u2018long, thick\u2019, and \u2018exquisitely fine\u2019. He was \u2018a young man, and manly in spirit as his looks were beautiful\u2019. I wonder what shampoo he used\u2026<\/p>\n Keats\u2019 hair is displayed both in Rome and in Hampstead. In the Keats-Shelley Memorial House in Rome a case holding a frame containing three locks pertaining to Shelley, Keats and Hunt can be found – rather appropriately – in the Salone. Moreover, in Hampstead, sat in a glass case beneath Keats\u2019 life-and death-masks, is the gold brooch containing Keats\u2019 hair made to Joseph Severn\u2019s own design in Rome shortly after his friend\u2019s death. The design of the brooch draws on the image of the unstrung lyre to symbolise Keats\u2019 unachieved poetic career. Within the crystal of the brooch, the gold frame of the lyre is partially strung with single strands of Keats\u2019 hair, thereby describing the poet\u2019s body itself as the unstrung lyre.<\/p>\n Equally, however, the ever bright hair of the poet described not the passage into death but a continuing connection to the living. Originally conceived as a gift for Fanny Brawne, Keats\u2019 fianc\u00e9e, as a mourning jewel, the brooch seems never to have reached her. Instead, Severn gifted it to his daughter on the occasion of her wedding in 1861, converting it thereby from a mourning brooch into a valuable and curious gift. It would metamorphose again when it came into the possession of the Keats museum into a museum object. Therefore over its lifetime this jewel\u2019s meaning has continually altered. It began as a homosocial mourning object, failed to become a heterosexual mourning object, was re-scripted as sentimental jewellery within the heterosexual economy of marriage, and then rethought as a museum exhibit. As such it now sits within its display case, insisting on the poet\u2019s immortality through his undecaying remains. It acts as a description of the poetic after-life: it is entombed, life-like, indeed, still immortally alive.<\/p>\n Also on Keats see\u00a0https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/?p=247<\/a> and https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/?p=119<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the deceased\u2019s author\u2019s skull, we turn today to the deceased\u2019s author\u2019s hair. In 1855, in Godey\u2019s Lady\u2019s Book and Magazine, English essayist and poet Leigh Hunt is recorded describing hair as \u2018the most delicate and lasting of all … Continue reading