Taking her inspiration from John Keats, who wrote to Fanny Brawne that her lips were “the dearest pleasures in the universe”, Nancy Dell’Olio has said that students should be taught how to write “proper love letters” at school.
The Italian former lawyer was guest celebrity at the opening of this year’s Keats festival, which also marks the reopening of the Keats House museum in Hampstead, where the poet lived from 1818 to 1820. “Keats is one of the most romantic poets of the 19th century,” said Dell’Olio, who is better known in the UK media for having dated England football manager Sven-Göran Eriksson, presenting Footballers’ Cribs on MTV and competing on the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing. “I’ve always been inspired by Keats because of his connection with Rome. In Rome he spent the Indian Summer there, knowing he was going to die.”
Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome in 1821, aged 25, and is buried in the city’s protestant cemetery. His grave bears the line: “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water”. He left behind him some of Britain’s best-loved poetry, including Ode to a Nightingale and Ode on a Grecian Urn, as well as a series of acclaimed letters, including his love missives to his neighbour turned fiancée, Fanny Brawne.
“I think they should do lessons at school to teach people how to write proper love letters,” said Dell’Olio. “The meaning of being eternal is only true through art so I’m delighted to open the Keats Museum today.”
Taking place over the next week-and-a-half, the Keats festival will see a series of talks, performances and workshops taking place in the Keats House museum, culminating in the introduction of the poet Michael Rosen as the location’s new writer-in-residence. “I was lucky enough to study Keats at university; his life and work have the power to inspire reflection and wonder,” said Rosen. “ I hope this carries through to the writing I will do at the house and the events I help to put on.”
Funding from Arts Council England means the House has been able to bring a range of manuscripts and artefacts out of storage and show them in the museum, with new displays unveiled on Thursday ranging from Keats’s copy of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, complete with his own notes in the margins, to the engagement ring he gave to Brawne. Although the pair never married, Brawne wore the ring until her death in 1865.
The Keats museum has also put on show a love letter to Brawne written from Keats’s sick bed in 1820, a brooch containing a miniature golden lyre made from strands of the poet’s hair, and the only surviving notebook from the poet’s time as a medical student, including his lecture notes. Keats qualified as a doctor in July 1816, but decided to write poetry full time instead shortly afterwards.
“This is an extremely exciting time for Keats House as we enter a new era,” said principal curator Vicky Carroll. “We are delighted that funding from Arts Council England has enabled us to bring iconic items from the collection out of the stores and put them on public display so that, through them, everyone can enjoy and learn about Keats’s inspirational life and poetry.”
