Accident in the itinerary: unforeseen loss in Keats's 1818 walking tour of Scotland as rite of conversion

The itinerary poem, rooted in the English topographic or local poem, illuminates the stages of psychological travel by cataloguing the steps on a journey or pilgrimage. Within cycles of finding and losing oneself during travel, these poems record epiphanies resulting from a series of encounters in unfamiliar environments. As a poetic subgenre sharing origins with the novel, early iterations emerged from the European walking tour and tour books that followed, transforming the leisure of tourism into realization or surmise regarding the travelers’ insistent concerns. Whether painstakingly sequential, enumerative in its imagining of encountered sites and beings, or taking a radial, disjointed, cinematic approach to discrete scenes, the contemporary itinerary poem translates travel into an act of mind and illustrates learning, as with early examples of the tradition.

Keats’s meditations on unforeseen events during his 1818 walking tour of Scotland provide a compelling framework for contemporary creative practice of the itinerary poem, featuring accidents as essential, if unanticipated, initiations on the journey to becoming an actualized artist. The poems and letters written on his literary pilgrimage may not include a strict example, but his writing during this time reflects seminal concerns of the subgenre, while also highlighting the importance of accidents—an overlooked feature. One poem referencing being bitten by a gadfly during a swim exemplifies how Keats saw unexpected incidents as causing especially powerful moments of illumination worthy of his creative practice. Another, graver, example is Keats’s discussion of catching a cold in the Isle of Mull, which arguably led to his eventual death from tuberculosis. The accidents Keats contemplates in his travel writing emerge as unforeseen agents of understanding, underscoring a paradox of the itinerary poem: what is lost by accident on the road becomes inseparable from what is found.