top of page

John Keats

Sep 2
3 min read

John Keats was born in London on October 31, 1795, and died in Rome on February 23, 1821. He was twenty-five. His surviving poetry spans roughly six years; his public career lasted less than five.


Keats is usually placed with Byron and Shelley in the second generation of English Romantic poets. Romanticism, however, was not a single creed. Its writers disagreed about politics, religion, nature, and the purpose of art. Keats's poems are sensuous but formally controlled. They ask what beauty can mean in a world where bodies age, pleasures pass, and every living thing must die.


FAMILY, SCHOOL, AND MEDICINE


Keats was the eldest of four children who survived infancy. His father, Thomas Keats, managed a livery stable and died after a riding accident in 1804. His mother, Frances, died in 1810 of an illness often thought to have been tuberculosis.


At the Clarke School in Enfield, Charles Cowden Clarke encouraged Keats's rapidly growing appetite for books and introduced him to Edmund Spenser and other earlier poets. At about fifteen, Keats left school to apprentice with Thomas Hammond, a surgeon-apothecary.


In October 1815 he registered at Guy's Hospital. He became a dresser, assisting surgeons and caring for patients before and after operations. This was surgery before modern anesthesia or antisepsis. Keats qualified as an apothecary in July 1816 and continued clinical work into 1817, but never established an independent practice or qualified as a surgeon. He chose poetry instead.


LEIGH HUNT AND THE HOSTILE REVIEWS


Keats's first published sonnet appeared in The Examiner in May 1816. Later that year he met its editor, Leigh Hunt, who promoted his work and introduced him to a literary circle that included Percy Bysshe Shelley. Keats published Poems in 1817 and Endymion in 1818.


Endymion was attacked by the Quarterly Review and Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. Their literary objections were mixed with class condescension and hostility toward Hunt's liberal politics. Blackwood's advised Keats that it was better to be “a starved apothecary than a starved poet.” The reviews became part of the Keats legend, but they did not cause his death. Tuberculosis did.


Keats's letters reveal the thinker behind the poems. In December 1817 he coined “negative capability” for the ability to remain amid “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts” without forcing them into a premature answer.


THE WORK OF 1818 AND 1819


In 1818 Keats nursed his younger brother Tom through consumption. Tom died on December 1, after which Keats moved to Wentworth Place in Hampstead.


Not every important Keats poem belongs to 1819. “On First Looking into Chapman's Homer” dates from 1816; “Isabella” and the beginning of “Hyperion” belong to 1818. Even so, the concentration of work in 1819 is remarkable. It brought “The Eve of St. Agnes,” “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” “Lamia,” the great odes, “To Autumn,” and the unfinished recasting “The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream.”


FANNY BRAWNE, ILLNESS, AND ROME


At Wentworth Place, Keats fell in love with his neighbor Fanny Brawne. They became privately engaged, but financial insecurity and then illness made marriage impossible.


In February 1820 Keats suffered a pulmonary hemorrhage. On medical advice he sailed for Italy with his friend, the painter Joseph Severn, who cared for him during his final months. Keats died in Rome and was buried in the Non-Catholic Cemetery. At his request, his gravestone bears the words: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”


THE REPUTATION HE DID NOT LIVE TO SEE


Keats's books sold slowly, but his lifetime reception was not uniformly hostile. His 1820 collection, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, received several favorable notices. His reputation developed gradually, gathering strength after Richard Monckton Milnes published his pioneering biography in 1848. The Pre-Raphaelites then found subjects and inspiration in his poetry.


Keats's early death explains why his body of work is small. It does not explain why the poems endure.



SOURCES AND FURTHER READING


 
 
bottom of page