The book ends with a brief Postscript on not reading letters. It examines the correspondence between Keats’s friend and carer Joseph Severn and Keats’s friends back in London as the poet is dying in Rome in the winter of 1820–1. The correspondence records how, having effectively stopped writing poetry more than a year earlier, Keats is now no longer able to read, let alone write, even letters. The chapter argues that this epistolary stoppage has itself fed into the cultural reception of the life and work of a poet who has become admired, respected, and loved for his correspondence as much as for his poems.