Fictionalizing Keats's Last Journey: the Young Man and the Sea

In September 1820, Keats left London on board the Maria Crowther. This paper uncovers the symbolic value of the journey: the sea is a non-place, the Maria Crowther a heterotopia; they are “Great Separators”, incommensurable distances between London and Rome, past and present, life and death. The literary echoes contained in Keats’s and Severn’s letters show that the voyage has a narrative structure and can thus be compared to the "Ancient Mariner"’s wait at sea, to Dante’s crossing of the Acheron, to the shipwreck in "Don Juan", and to Leigh Hunt’s tumultuous sea voyage (1821-2).