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A Brief Biography of John Keats

By Tim Lambert

His Early Life

John Keats was one of England’s greatest poets. He was born in London on 31 October 1795. His father Thomas Keats was an innkeeper. His mother was called Frances. The couple had 5 children. In 1803 John Keats went to Clarke’s School in Enfield.

However, in 1804 tragedy struck when his father was killed by falling off a horse. His mother quickly remarried. However, she soon separated from her new husband. John Keats then went to live with his grandmother. John was reconciled with his mother by 1809 but by then she was ill. She died in 1810.

The Great Poet

In 1810 John left school and in 1811 he was apprenticed to a surgeon and apothecary in Edmonton. As a teenager, Keats became passionately fond of poetry and when he was about 18 he wrote his first poem, one entitled ‘Imitation of Spenser’.

In 1815 John became a student at Guy’s Hospital in London. But he continued to write poetry. In 1816 he had a poem published for the first time, in a magazine called The Examiner. It was a sonnet called ‘O Solitude!’. Also in 1816, Keats passed his exams. Then in 1817, he published a book called ‘Poems’. However, it was not a success, attracting little interest.

Nevertheless, Keats continued writing. His epic poem Endymion was published in 1818. During 1818-1819 Keats continued to write great poems including ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, ‘Hyperion’, ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, and ‘Ode to Autumn’.

However, in 1820 Keats fell ill with tuberculosis. He went to Italy in the hope that the climate might help. Nevertheless, John Keats died in Rome on 23 February 1821. He was only 25. Keats was buried in the Protestant cemetery.

Last revised 2023

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(1795-1821)

Who Was John Keats?

John Keats devoted his short life to the perfection of poetry marked by vivid imagery, great sensuous appeal and an attempt to express a philosophy through classical legend. In 1818 he went on a walking tour in the Lake District. His exposure and overexertion on that trip brought on the first symptoms of the tuberculosis, which ended his life.

Early Years

A revered English poet whose short life spanned just 25 years, John Keats was born October 31, 1795, in London, England. He was the oldest of Thomas and Frances Keats’ four children. Keats lost his parents at an early age. He was eight years old when his father, a livery stable-keeper, was killed after being trampled by a horse.

His father's death had a profound effect on the young boy's life. In a more abstract sense, it shaped Keats' understanding for the human condition, both its suffering and its loss. This tragedy and others helped ground Keats' later poetry—one that found its beauty and grandeur from the human experience.

In a more mundane sense, Keats' father's death greatly disrupted the family's financial security. His mother, Frances, seemed to have launched a series of missteps and mistakes after her husband’s death; she quickly remarried and just as quickly lost a good portion of the family's wealth. After her second marriage fell apart, Frances left the family, leaving her children in the care of her mother.

She eventually returned to her children's life, but her life was in tatters. In early 1810, she died of tuberculosis.

During this period, Keats found solace and comfort in art and literature. At Enfield Academy, where he started shortly before his father's passing, Keats proved to be a voracious reader. He also became close to the school's headmaster, John Clarke, who served as a sort of a father figure to the orphaned student and encouraged Keats' interest in literature.

Back home, Keats' maternal grandmother turned over control of the family's finances, which was considerable at the time, to a London merchant named Richard Abbey. Overzealous in protecting the family's money, Abbey showed himself to be reluctant to let the Keats children spend much of it. He refused to be forthcoming about how much money the family actually had and in some cases was downright deceitful.

There is some debate as to whose decision it was to pull Keats out of Enfield, but in the fall of 1810, Keats left the school for studies to become a surgeon. He eventually studied medicine at a London hospital and became a licensed apothecary in 1816.

Early Poetry

But Keats' career in medicine never truly took off. Even as he studied medicine, Keats’ devotion to literature and the arts never ceased. Through his friend, Cowden Clarke, whose father was the headmaster at Enfield, Keats met publisher, Leigh Hunt of The Examiner .

Hunt's radicalism and biting pen had landed him in prison in 1813 for libeling Prince Regent. Hunt, though, had an eye for talent and was an early supporter of Keats poetry and became his first publisher. Through Hunt, Keats was introduced to a world of politics that was new to him and had greatly influenced what he put on the page. In honor of Hunt, Keats wrote the sonnet, "Written on the Day that Mr. Leigh Hunt Left Prison."

In addition to affirming Keats' standing as a poet, Hunt also introduced the young poet to a group of other English poets, including Percy Bysshe Shelley and Williams Wordsworth.

In 1817 Keats leveraged his new friendships to publish his first volume of poetry, Poems by John Keats . The following year, Keats' published "Endymion," a mammoth four-thousand line poem based on the Greek myth of the same name.

Keats had written the poem in the summer and fall of 1817, committing himself to at least 40 lines a day. He completed the work in November of that year and it was published in April 1818.

Keats' daring and bold style earned him nothing but criticism from two of England's more revered publications, Blackwood's Magazine and the Quarterly Review . The attacks were an extension of heavy criticism lobbed at Hunt and his cadre of young poets. The most damning of those pieces had come from Blackwood's, whose piece, "On the Cockney School of Poetry," shook Keats and made him nervous to publish "Endymion."

Keats' hesitation was warranted. Upon its publication the lengthy poem received a lashing from the more conventional poetry community. One critic called the work, the "imperturbable driveling idiocy of Endymion." Others found the four-book structure and its general flow hard to follow and confusing.

Recovering Poet

How much of an effect this criticism had on Keats is uncertain, but it is clear that he did take notice of it. But Shelley's later accounts of how the criticism destroyed the young poet and led to his declining health, however, have been refuted.

Keats in fact, had already moved beyond "Endymion" even before it was published. By the end of 1817, he was reexamining poetry's role in society. In lengthy letters to friends, Keats outlined his vision of a kind of poetry that drew its beauty from real world human experience rather than some mythical grandeur.

Keats was also formulating the thinking behind his most famous doctrine, Negative Capability , which is the idea that humans are capable of transcending intellectual or social constraints and far exceed, creatively or intellectually, what human nature is thought to allow.

In effect Keats was responding to his critics, and conventional thinking in general, which sought to squeeze the human experience into a closed system with tidy labels and rational relationships. Keats saw a world more chaotic, more creative than what others he felt, would permit.

The Mature Poet

In the summer of 1818, Keats took a walking tour in Northern England and Scotland. He returned home later that year to care for his brother, Tom, who'd fallen deeply ill with tuberculosis.

Keats, who around this time fell in love with a woman named Fanny Brawne, continued to write. He'd proven prolific for much of the past year. His work included his first Shakespearean sonnet, "When I have fears that I may cease to be," which was published in January 1818.

Two months later, Keats published "Isabella," a poem that tells the story of a woman who falls in love with a man beneath her social standing, instead of the man her family has chosen her to marry. The work was based on a story from Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio, and it's one Keats himself would grow to dislike.

His work also included the beautiful "To Autumn," a sensuous work published in 1820 that describes ripening fruit, sleepy workers, and a maturing sun. The poem, and others, demonstrated a style Keats himself had crafted all his own, one that was filled with more sensualities than any contemporary Romantic poetry.

Keats' writing also revolved around a poem he called "Hyperion," an ambitious Romantic piece inspired by Greek myth that told the story of the Titans' despondency after their losses to the Olympians.

But the death of Keats' brother halted his writing. He finally returned to the work in late 1819, rewriting his unfinished poem with a new title, "The Fall of Hyperion," which would go unpublished until more than three decades after Keats' death.

This, of course, speaks to the small audience for Keats' poetry during his lifetime. In all, the poet published three volumes of poetry during his life but managed to sell just a combined 200 copies of his work by the time of his death in 1821. His third and final volume of poetry, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems , was published in July 1820.

Final Years and Death

In 1819 Keats contracted tuberculosis. His health deteriorated quickly. Soon after his last volume of poetry was published, he ventured off to Italy with his close friend, the painter Joseph Severn, on the advice of his doctor, who had told him he needed to be in a warmer climate for the winter.

The trip marked the end of his romance with Brawne. His health issues and his own dreams of becoming a successful writer had stifled their chances of ever getting married.

Keats arrived in Rome in November of that year and for a brief time started to feel better. But within a month, he was back in bed, suffering from a high temperature. The last few months of his life proved particularly painful for the poet.

His doctor in Rome placed Keats on a strict diet that consisted of a single anchovy and a piece of bread per day in order to limit the flow of blood to the stomach. He also induced heavy bleeding, resulting in Keats suffering from both a lack of oxygen and a lack of food.

Keats' agony was so severe that at one point he pressed his doctor and asked him, "How long is this posthumous existence of mine to go on?"

Keats' death came on February 23, 1821. It's believed he was clutching the hand of his friend, Severn, at the time of his passing.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: John Keats
• Birth Year: 1795
• Birth date: October 31, 1795
• Birth City: London
• Birth Country: England
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: English Romantic lyric poet John Keats was dedicated to the perfection of poetry marked by vivid imagery that expressed a philosophy through classical legend.
• Fiction and Poetry
• Astrological Sign: Scorpio
• Death Year: 1821
• Death date: February 23, 1821
• Death City: Rome
• Death Country: Italy

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CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: John Keats Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
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• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: November 12, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014
• If Poetry comes not as naturally as Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.

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Biography of John Keats, English Romantic Poet

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John Keats (October 31, 1795– February 23, 1821) was an English Romantic poet of the second generation, alongside Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. He is best known for his odes, including "Ode to a Grecian Urn," "Ode to a Nightingale," and his long form poem Endymion . His usage of sensual imagery and statements such as “beauty is truth and truth is beauty” made him a precursor of aestheticism. 

Fast Facts: John Keats

• Known For: Romantic poet known for his search for perfection in poetry and his use of vivid imagery. His poems are recognized as some of the best in the English language.
• Born​: October 31, 1795 in London, England
• Parents: Thomas Keats and Frances Jennings
• Died​: February 23, 1821 in Rome, Italy
• Education​: King's College, London
• Selected Works: “Sleep and Poetry” (1816), “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819), “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819 ), “Hyperion” (1818-19), Endymion (1818)
• Notable Quote​: "Beauty is truth, truth is beauty,'—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." 

John Keats was born in London on October 31, 1795. His parents were Thomas Keats, a hostler at the stables at the Swan and Hoop Inn, which he would later manage, and Frances Jennings. He had three younger siblings: George, Thomas, and Frances Mary, known as Fanny. His father died in April 1804 in a horse riding accident, without leaving a will.

In 1803, Keats was sent to John Clarke's school in Enfield, which was close to his grandparents’ house and had a curriculum that was more progressive and modern than what was found in similar institutions. John Clarke fostered his interest in classical studies and history. Charles Cowden Clarke, who was the headmaster’s son, became a mentor figure for Keats, and introduced him to Renaissance writers Torquato Tasso, Spenser, and the works of George Chapman. A temperamental boy, young Keats was both indolent and belligerent, but starting at age 13, he channeled his energies into the pursuit of academic excellence, to the point that, in midsummer 1809, he won his first academic prize.

When Keats was 14, his mother died of tuberculosis, and Richard Abbey and Jon Sandell were appointed as the children's guardians. That same year, Keats left John Clarke to become an apprentice to surgeon and apothecary Thomas Hammond, who was the doctor of his mother’s side of the family. He lived in the attic above Hammond’s practice until 1813.

Keats wrote his first poem, “An Imitation of Spenser,” in 1814, aged 19. After finishing his apprenticeship with Hammond, Keats enrolled as a medical student at Guy’s Hospital in October 1815. While there, he started assisting senior surgeons at the hospital during surgeries, which was a job of significant responsibility. His job was time consuming and it hindered his creative output, which caused significant distress. He had ambition as a poet, and he admired the likes of Leigh Hunt and Lord Byron.

He received his apothecary license in 1816, which allowed him to be a professional apothecary, physician, and surgeon, but instead, he announced to his guardian that he would pursue poetry. His first printed poem was the sonnet “O Solitude,” which appeared in Leigh Hunt’s magazine The Examiner. In the summer of 1816, while vacationing with Charles Cowden Clarke in the town of Margate, he started working on “Caligate.” Once that summer was over, he resumed his studies to become a member of the Royal College of Surgeons. 

Poems (1817)

Sleep and poetry.

What is more gentle than a wind in summer? What is more soothing than the pretty hummer That stays one moment in an open flower, And buzzes cheerily from bower to bower? What is more tranquil than a musk-rose blowing In a green island, far from all men's knowing? More healthful than the leafiness of dales? More secret than a nest of nightingales? More serene than Cordelia's countenance? More full of visions than a high romance? What, but thee Sleep? Soft closer of our eyes! Low murmurer of tender lullabies! Light hoverer around our happy pillows! Wreather of poppy buds, and weeping willows! Silent entangler of a beauty's tresses! Most happy listener! when the morning blesses Thee for enlivening all the cheerful eyes That glance so brightly at the new sun-rise(“Sleep and Poetry,” lines 1-18)

Thanks to Clarke, Keats met Leigh Hunt in October of 1816, who, in turn introduced him to Thomas Barnes, editor of the Times, conductor Thomas Novello, and the poet John Hamilton Reynolds. He published his first collection, Poems, which includes “Sleep and poetry” and “I stood Tiptoe,” but it was panned by the critics. Charles and James Ollier, the publishers, felt ashamed of it, and the collection aroused little interest. Keats promptly went to other publishers, Taylor and Hessey, who strongly supported his work and, one month after the publication of Poems , he already had an advance and a contract for a new book. Hessey also became a close friend of Keats. Through him and his partner, Keats met the Eton-educated lawyer Richard Woodhouse, a fervent admirer of Keats who would serve as his legal advisor. Woodhouse became an avid collector of Keats-related materials, known as Keatsiana, and his collection is, to this day, one of the most important sources of informations on Keats' work. The young poet also became part of William Hazlitt’s circle, which cemented his reputation as an exponent of a new school of poetry.

Upon formally leaving his hospital training in December 1816, Keats' health took a major hit. He left the damp rooms of London in favor of the village of Hampstead in April 1817 to live with his brothers, but both he and his brother George ended up taking care of their brother Tom, who had contracted tuberculosis. This new living situation brought him close to Samuel T. Coleridge, an elder poet of the first generation of Romantics, who lived in Highgate. On April 11, 1818, the two took a walk together on Hampstead Heath, where they talked about “nightingales, poetry, poetical sensation, and metaphysics.” 

In the Summer of 1818, Keats started touring Scotland, Ireland, and the Lake District, but by July of 1818, while on the Isle of Mull, he caught a terrible cold that debilitated him to the point that he had to return South. Keats' brother, Tom, died of Tuberculosis on December 1st, 1818.

A Great Year (1818-19)

Ode on a grecian urn.

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, Sylvan historian, who canst thus express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme: What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape Of deities or mortals, or of both, In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

“Ode on a Grecian Urn,” lines 1—10

Keats moved to Wentworth place, on the edge of Hampstead Heath, the property of his friend Charles Armitage Brown. This is the period when he wrote his most mature work: five out of his six great odes were composed in the Spring of 1819: "Ode to Psyche," "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode on Melancholy," "Ode on Indolence." In 1818, he also published Endymion, which, much like Poems, was not appreciated by critics. Harsh assessments include “imperturbable drivelling idiocy” by John Gibson Lockhart for The Quarterly Review, who also thought that Keats would have been better off resuming his career as an apothecary, deeming “to be a starved apothecary” a wiser thing than a starved poet. Lockhart was also the one who lumped together Hunt, Hazlitt, and Keats as member as “the Cockney School,” which was spiteful of both their poetic style and their lack of a traditional elite education that also signified belonging to the aristocracy or upper class.

At some point in 1819, Keats was so short on money that he considered becoming a journalist or a surgeon on a ship. In 1819, he also wrote "The Eve of St. Agnes," "La Belle Dame sans Merci," "Hyperion," "Lamia," and the play Otho the Great. He presented these poems to his publishers for consideration for a new book project, but they were unimpressed by them. They criticized "The Eve of St. Agnes" for its "sense of pettish disgust," while they considered "Don Juan" unfit for ladies. 

Rome (1820-21)

Over the course of the year 1820, Keats’ symptoms of tuberculosis got more and more serious. He coughed up blood twice in February of 1820 and then was bled by the attending physician. Leigh Hunt took care of him, but after the summer, Keats had to agree to move to Rome with his friend Joseph Severn. The voyage, via the ship Maria Crowther, was not smooth, as dead calm alternated with storms and, upon docking, they were quarantined due to a cholera outbreak in Britain. He arrived in Rome on November 14, even though by that time, he could no longer find the warmer climate that was recommended to him for his health. Upon getting to Rome, Keats also started having stomach problems on top of respiratory problems, and he was denied opium for pain relief, as it was thought he might use it as a quick way to commit suicide. Despite Severn’s nursing, Keats was in a constant state of agony to the point that upon waking up, he would cry because he was still alive.

Keats died in Rome on February 23, 1821. His remains rest in Rome’s Protestant cemetery. His tombstone bears the inscription “Here lies One whose Name was writ in Water.” Seven weeks after the funeral, Shelley wrote the elegy Adonais, which memorialized Keats. It contains 495 lines and 55 Spenserian stanzas. 

Bright Stars: Female Acquaintances

Bright star.

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art— Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night And watching, with eternal lids apart, Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite, The moving waters at their priestlike task Of pure ablution round earth's human shores, Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask Of snow upon the mountains and the moors— No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable, Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast, To feel for ever its soft fall and swell, Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

There were two important women in John Keats’ life. The first one was Isabella Jones, whom he met in 1817. Keats was both intellectually and sexually attracted to her, and wrote about frequenting “her rooms” in the winter of 1818-19 and about their physical relationship, saying that he “warmed with her” and “kissed her” in letters to his brother George. He then met Fanny Brawne in the fall of 1818. She had talent for dressmaking, languages, and a theatrical bent. By late fall 1818, their relationship had deepened, and, throughout the following year, Keats lent her books such as Dante’s Inferno. By the summer of 1819, they had an informal engagement, mainly due to Keats’ dire straits, and their relationship remained unconsummated. In the last months of their relationship, Keats’ love took a darker and melancholic turn, and in poems such as "La Belle Dame sans Merci" and "The Eve of St. Agnes," love is closely associated with death. They parted in September 1820 when Keats, due to his deteriorating health, was advised to move to warmer climates. He left for Rome knowing that death was near: he died five months later.

The famed sonnet "Bright Star" was first composed for Isabella Jones, but he gave it to Fanny Brawne after revising it.

Themes and Literary Style

Keats often juxtaposed the comic and the serious in poems that are not primarily funny. Much like his fellow Romantics, Keats struggled with the legacy of prominent poets before him. They retained an oppressive power that hindered the liberation of the imagination. Milton is the most notable case: Romantics both worshipped him and tried to distance themselves from him, and the same happened to Keats. His first Hyperion displayed Miltonic influences, which led him to discard it, and critics saw it as a poem “that might have been written by John Milton, but one that was unmistakably by no other than John Keats.” 

Poet William Butler Yeats , in the eloquent simplicities of Per Amica Silentia Lunae , saw Keats as having “been born with that thirst for luxury common to many at the outsetting of the Romantic Movement,” and thought therefore that the poet of To Autumn “but gave us his dream of luxury.”

Keats died young, aged 25, with only a three-year-long writing career. Nonetheless, he left a substantial body of work that makes him more than a “poet of promise.” His mystique was also heightened by his alleged humble origins, as he was presented as a lowlife and someone who received a sparse education. 

Shelley, in his preface to Adonais (1821), described Keats as "delicate," "fragile," and "blighted in the bud": "a pale flower by some sad maiden cherished ... The bloom, whose petals nipt before they blew / Died on the promise of the fruit," wrote Shelley. 

Keats himself underestimated his writerly ability. "I have left no immortal work behind me—nothing to make my friends proud of my memory—but I have lov'd the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember’d," he wrote to Fanny Brawne.

Richard Monckton Milnes published the first biography of Keats in 1848, which fully inserted him into the canon. The Encyclopaedia Britannica extolled the virtues of Keats in numerous instances: in 1880, Swinburne wrote in his entry on John Keats that "the Ode to a Nightingale, [is] one of the final masterpieces of human work in all time and for all ages," while the 1888 edition stated that, "Of these [odes] perhaps the two nearest to absolute perfection, to the triumphant achievement and accomplishment of the very utmost beauty possible to human words, may be that of to Autumn and that on a Grecian Urn." In the 20th century, Wilfred Owen, W.B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot were all inspired by Keats.

As far as other arts are concerned, given how sensual his writing was, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood admired him, and painters depicted scenes of Keats poems, such as "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," "The Eve of St. Agnes," and "Isabella."

• Bate, Walter Jackson.  John Keats . Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963.
• Bloom, Harold.  John Keats . Chelsea House, 2007.
• White, Robert S.  John Keats a Literary Life . Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
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Biography Online

John Keats Biography

John Keats was an influential Romantic poet, who has become one of the most widely respected and loved British poets.

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

– John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn .

Short Bio John Keats

When he was young, Keats lost both his father (aged 8) and later his mother (aged 14). Orphaned at an early age, Keats and his siblings were looked after by their grandmother. It also placed the family in a difficult financial situation – Keats would struggle with money throughout his life.

Job as surgeon

Having finished school, Keats took an apprenticeship at Guy’s Hospital, London in October 1815. In the early nineteenth century, the job of a surgeon was very challenging; in the absence of anaesthetic and modern technology, there was only a limited amount doctors could do to ease the condition of patients. This suffering of patients and people was a theme Keats would later incorporate into his poetry.

Life as a poet

It was hoped that this medical training would give Keats a secure career and financial income. However, in 1816, despite making good progress, Keats told his guardian that he couldn’t become a surgeon and felt compelled to try and make a career as a poet. It was a decision that his guardians failed to understand because, at the time, there was little hope of making money from writing poetry.

However, Keats was introduced to some of the leading literary figures of the day, such as Leigh Hunt, Percy Shelley and poet John Hamilton Reynolds. This enabled him to publish his first collection of poems, but they were not a critical success and sold very few copies.

From 1817, John spent considerable time nursing his brother Tom, who was suffering from tuberculosis. In 1818, they went on a walking tour of northern England and Scotland. His brother’s conditions deteriorated, and, weakened by cold himself, it is likely that John Keats contracted the ‘family disease’ of tuberculosis.

Despite the difficulty of his nursing his dying brother and suffering a series of financial difficulties, Keats began his most prolific period of writing. Based on the edge of Hampstead Heath he composed five of his six odes.

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: ’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thine happiness,— That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees, In some melodious plot Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

First stanza of “Ode to a Nightingale”, May 1819

Around this time, he also met with the great poet William Wordsworth and Charles Lamb.

Publishing of Endymion

In 1818, his great work Endymion was published, however, many reviews were highly critical of Keat’s ‘immaturity’, it was labelled by some, including Byron as ‘Cockney Poetry’ – suggesting the poet used uncouth language. The edition sold very few copies, leaving both Keats and the publisher with a feeling of shame. Despite this critical failure, Keats gave an indication he strove only for genius. He did retain a faith in his poetry. As he writes:

“I was never afraid of failure; for I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.”

Letter to James Hessey (October 9, 1818)

Despite the support of some literary friends, this critical review left a profound mark on Keats. Throughout his short life, he felt he had been a failure, unable to leave any lasting mark on poetry. On his deathbed, he would later write scathing letters saying perhaps he should have sold out to mammon (money) rather than pursue the purity of his poetic journey. In his last letter to Shelley, he writes bitterly:

“…A modern work it is said must have a purpose, which may be the God – an artist must serve Mammon – he must have “self concentration” selfishness perhaps. .. ”(16 August 1820) [ link ]

In this last letter, Keats also describes his personal view:

“My imagination is a Monastery and I am its Monk.”

(16 August 1820) [ link ]

John Keats and Fanny Browne

In 1818, he first came into contact with Frances (Fanny) Brawne. She was 18 at the time, and a close friendship arose between them. However, the relationship was overshadowed by Keats’ nursing of his brother Tom; also the lack of finance meant that Keats had no realistic chance of being able to marry. They wrote many intimate letters, in which Keats often bared his soul and the depth of his feeling:

“My love has made me selfish. I cannot exist without you — I am forgetful of every thing but seeing you again — my Life seems to stop there — I see no further. You have absorb’d me.”

The relationship was also cut short by the aggravation of Keat’s tuberculosis. By September 1820, Keats was very fragile from the effects of the disease. He was advised to move to warmer climes, and so with the help of friends, he was booked on a ship to Italy. However, after a rough sea journey, Keats’ health failed to improve; within a few months of arriving in Italy, he died from the disease that had claimed his mother and brother.

The last months were a period of great turmoil and difficulty. Often denied, even a small quantity of opium to ease the physical pain, Keats was racked with a feeling of insufficiency relating to the negative reviews his poetry had received.

Keats was buried in a cemetery in Rome, with the simple inscription on his tombstone ” Young English poet – Here lies one whose name was writ in water .”

Keats had died at the age of 25, after a period of just six years writing poetry. During his lifetime, he was a commercial and critical failure, selling only around 200 copies of books.

However, within a few years of his death, his reputation was to sharply rise – becoming one of Britain’s best-loved poets.

In particular, the Cambridge Apostles and Lord Tennyson (who became a popular Poet Laureate) admired the poetry of Keats and this helped make him known to more people. Pre-Raphaelite painters such as Millais and Rossetti were inspired by Keats’ imagery and used some of his poetic images in their paintings. By 1848, Richard Milnes had written the first biography of Keats.

In the Twentieth Century, many poets such as Wilfred Owen , W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot said Keats was a key literary inspiration.

The Twentieth Century also saw considerable interest in the letters of Keats. Keats devoted many letters to the subject of poetry – offering a unique discussion of the role and importance of poetry.

“Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.”

– Letter to John Hamilton Reynolds (February 3, 1818)

The poetry of Keats is wide-ranging and includes some of the most memorable lines in English poetry. His most famous poems such as the Odes are famous for their lyrical perfection in their poetic invocation of beauty. But, Keats, in poems such as Endymion , also wrote challenging poetry striving to challenge established currents of thought and question why things were.

“None can usurp this height… But those to whom the miseries of the world Are misery, and will not let them rest.”

Keats, “The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream”, Canto I, l. 147 (1819)

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “ Biography of John Keats ”, Oxford, UK www.biographyonline.net  Published  24th Jan 2010. Last updated 18 February 2018.

John Keats   – by W. Jackson Bate – winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography at Amazon

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English Romantic poet John Keats was born on October 31, 1795, in London. The oldest of four children, he lost both his parents at a young age. His father, a livery-stable keeper, died when Keats was eight; his mother died of tuberculosis six years later. After his mother’s death, Keats’s maternal grandmother appointed two London merchants, Richard Abbey and John Rowland Sandell, as guardians. Abbey, a prosperous tea broker, assumed the bulk of this responsibility, while Sandell played only a minor role. When Keats was fifteen, Abbey withdrew him from the Clarke School, Enfield, to apprentice with an apothecary-surgeon and study medicine in a London hospital. In 1816 Keats became a licensed apothecary, but he never practiced his profession, deciding instead to write poetry.

Around this time, Keats met Leigh Hunt, an influential editor of the Examiner , who published his sonnets “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” and “O Solitude.” Hunt also introduced Keats to a circle of literary men, including the poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Wordsworth . The group’s influence enabled Keats to see his first volume, Poems by John Keats , published in 1817. Shelley, who was fond of Keats, had advised him to develop a more substantial body of work before publishing it. Keats, who was not as fond of Shelley, did not follow his advice. Endymion , a four-thousand-line erotic/allegorical romance based on the Greek myth of the same name, appeared the following year. Two of the most influential critical magazines of the time, the Quarterly Review and Blackwood’s Magazine , attacked the collection. Calling the romantic verse of Hunt’s literary circle “the Cockney school of poetry,” Blackwood’s declared Endymion to be nonsense and recommended that Keats give up poetry. Shelley, who privately disliked Endymion but recognized Keats’s genius, wrote a more favorable review, but it was never published. Shelley also exaggerated the effect that the criticism had on Keats, attributing his declining health over the following years to a spirit broken by the negative reviews.

Keats spent the summer of 1818 on a walking tour in Northern England and Scotland, returning home to care for his brother, Tom, who suffered from tuberculosis. While nursing his brother, Keats met and fell in love with a woman named Fanny Brawne. Writing some of his finest poetry between 1818 and 1819, Keats mainly worked on “Hyperion,” a Miltonic blank-verse epic of the Greek creation myth. He stopped writing “Hyperion” upon the death of his brother, after completing only a small portion, but in late 1819 he returned to the piece and rewrote it as “The Fall of Hyperion” (unpublished until 1856). That same autumn Keats contracted tuberculosis, and by the following February he felt that death was already upon him, referring to the present as his “posthumous existence.”

In July 1820, he published his third and best volume of poetry, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems . The three title poems, dealing with mythical and legendary themes of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance times, are rich in imagery and phrasing. The volume also contains the unfinished “Hyperion,” and three poems considered among the finest in the English language, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode on Melancholy,” and “Ode to a Nightingale.” The book received enthusiastic praise from Hunt, Shelley, Charles Lamb, and others, and in August, Frances Jeffrey, influential editor of the Edinburgh Review , wrote a review praising both the new book and Endymion .

The fragment “Hyperion” was considered by Keats’s contemporaries to be his greatest achievement, but by that time he had reached an advanced stage of his disease and was too ill to be encouraged. He continued a correspondence with Fanny Brawne and—when he could no longer bear to write to her directly—her mother, but his failing health and his literary ambitions prevented their getting married. Under his doctor’s orders to seek a warm climate for the winter, Keats went to Rome with his friend, the painter Joseph Severn. He died there on February 23, 1821, at the age of twenty-five, and was buried in the Protestant cemetery.

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English History

The Life of John Keats (1795-1821) – Key Facts, Information & Biography

John Keats was born on 31 October 1795, the first of Frances Jennings and Thomas Keats’s five children, one of whom died in infancy. His parents had been wed for barely a year when John was born. His maternal grandparents, John and Alice Jennings, were well-off and, upon his parents’ marriage, had entrusted the management of their livery business to Thomas. These stables, called the ‘Swan and Hoop’, were located in north London and provided horses for hire to adjacent neighborhoods.

Thomas and Frances lived at the stables through the births of their first three children. George was born on 28 February 1797 and Thomas on 18 November 1799. After their births, the young couple felt successful enough to move to a separate house on Craven Street, about a half-mile from the business. Here, on 28 April 1801, their son Edward was born; he died shortly thereafter. And on 3 June 1803, the last of their children and only daughter, Frances Mary, was born.

Details of Keats’s early life are scarce. During the last few years of his life, letters allow one to track him virtually week-to-week but his childhood and adolescence are another matter. Indeed, virtually all the information known is in the form of reminisces, many taken years after Keats had died. Understandably, one must view these memories with some skepticism. Whether discussing Keats’s physical appearance (his brother George said he resembled their mother while a family friend said it was the father) or his pastimes, these sources often contradict one another.

Keats’s father, Thomas Keats, died on Sunday, 15 April 1804, while returning home from visiting John and George at Enfield school. It was believed his horse slipped on the cobblestones and threw him to the ground. Suffering a skull fracture, he lived for a few hours after being found by a night watchman. Barely two months later, on 27 June 1804, Frances Jennings remarried. Grief-stricken and unable to conduct the livery business herself, she wed a minor bank clerk named William Rawlings. Rawlings was a fortune-hunter and the marriage was a failure. The children were immediately sent to live with their grandmother and, a few years later, their mother joined them. She had left Rawlings and, with him, the stables she had inherited from her former husband. From this time on, her health declined precipitously.

The upheaval in the children’s lives continued. On 8 March 1805, their grandfather died and the financial turmoil which haunted Keats’s life began. For John Jennings, a kindly and generous man, was also gullible; he had hired a land surveyor, not a lawyer, to draft his will and the result was an ill-written and vague document. Mr. Jennings’s real wishes were obscured and open to interpretation. The specifics of the case are far too detailed for this generalized sketch, but are available in any biography of Keats. There is also a book called The Keats Inheritance which can be found in any good university library. It is worth mentioning here simply because Keats’s entire adult life was spent struggling with money.

The fight over shares in the estate began shortly after Jennings’s death and ended long after John Keats’s death. Their grandmother, now almost seventy, was left with half the income she and her husband had lived on. To practice economy, she moved to a smaller home and attempted to save what she could. In her own will, she appointed Richard Abbey trustee and guardian of her grandchildren. This appointment was to have tragic consequences for all the Keats children, but most especially John.

Mrs. Jennings’s new home was close to Enfield, where the youngest son Tom was sent to join his brothers at school. At Enfield, the Keats brothers were well-liked and popular. John caught the attention of his schoolfellows; their reminisces stress his bravery and generosity to others. They also mentioned his sensitivity, a trait which did not prevent him from engaging in fights. As schoolfellow Edward Holmes remembered, “The generosity & daring of his character – in passions of tears or outrageous fits of laughter always in extremes will help to paint Keats in his boyhood.” But Holmes, who later became a well-known music critic, stressed that Keats “was a boy whom any one might easily have fancied would become great – but rather in some military capacity than in literature.” Simply put, there was little in John’s character which would indicate a great future in poetry.

The money problems which began with his grandfather’s death were exacerbated by his mother’s death in mid-March of 1810 and his grandmother’s death in December of 1814. Keats, as the eldest child, was old enough to try and help his mother through her illness; her death impressed itself upon him deeply. His grandmother, whose home had been his for nearly a decade, was also sorely missed. Richard Abbey now became the primary ‘adult’ influence in Keats’s life. Abbey withdrew John and George from school and apprenticed John to an apothecary/surgeon named Dr. Hammond. Keats displayed great aptitude for the difficult job though his enthusiasm waned as his interest in poetry grew. For the next three years, he studied medicine. He also wrote his first poem in 1814, a few months before his grandmother died.

Abbey was executor of her estate and thus guardian of her grandchildren. He took Keats’s younger sister Fanny into his home. Using the vague wording of John Jennings’ will as at pretext, he often withheld money from the children. He did this despite his legal obligations, largely because he believed they would waste the money and become destitute. The actual amount of the inheritance was also never made clear. And so the Keats children struggled for money while Abbey wrangled with the inheritance, whether through malice or disinterest. The psychological and physical effects of this poverty were profound.

Abbey’s own conservative austerity made him unsympathetic to the children. He had a low opinion of their temperaments and maturity. This opinion was formed by the behavior of their mother during her marriage and estrangement from Rawlings. There had been rumors of Frances wandering the streets in disarray and living in sin with various men. Abbey wanted the Keats sons to achieve success in respectable, stable careers, hence his desire for John to become an apothecary. Like most Englishmen, he did not consider poetry, particularly as practiced by a middle-class boy, to be a good career choice. Poetry was the provenance of the noble and wealthy who possessed the leisure and education to indulge in wordplay. John Keats could not afford such a lifestyle. This attitude was pervasive enough to influence early reviews of Keats’s poetry as influential magazines such as Blackwood’s called him ‘ignorant and unsettled’, a ‘pretender’ to a poetic career.

On 1 October 1815, Keats entered Guy’s Hospital for more formal training. Henry Stephens, a classmate and later the inventor of blue-black ink, described the would-be poet: Whilst attending lectures, he [Keats] would sit & instead of Copying out the lecture, would often scribble some doggerel rhymes, among the Notes of Lecture, particularly if he got hold of another Student’s Syllabus – In my Syllabus of Chemical Lectures he scribbled many lines on the paper cover, This cover has been long torn off, except one small piece on which is the following fragment of Doggerel rhyme Give me women, wine and snuff Until I cry out “hold, enough!” You may do so sans objection Till the day of resurrection; For, bless my beard, they aye shall be My beloved Trinity. Stephens’s sensibility made him excise the reference to women and the last two lines when he told this story to Keats’s first biographer, RM Milnes. In March 1816, Keats became a dresser, applying bandages and, in the summer, a Licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries. But the most momentous event was the publication of his first poem in The Examiner. There was little critical reception, but Keats was attracting new friends who shared his literary tastes, among them Leigh Hunt, Benjamin Haydon and John Reynolds. Hunt was the earliest and most enthusiastic supporter of Keats. As a critic on the fringes of the literary establishment, he did all he could to champion his friend’s career. Oddly, Keats came to be critical of Hunt’s personal and professional affairs, which was a rare lapse in his usually generous nature. In December, Hunt quoted Keats in his famous ‘Young Poets’ article. He had already given him the nickname ‘Junkets’, from Keats’s Cockney pronunciation of his own name. By this time, Keats had decided to end his medical training. He had no illusions of the difficulty of a poetic career but he was determined to follow his dream. He was already borrowing as many books as possible from various friends, and became an ardent admirer of Spenser and Shakespeare . This devotion to reading, which had begun after his father’s death and remained throughout his life, inspired his most famous poem of 1816, On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer: Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne; Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star’d at the Pacific–and all his men Look’d at each other with a wild surmise– Silent, upon a peak in Darien. The following year, 1817, was even more momentous for Keats. While living with his brothers George and Tom in Cheapside, he continued to write poetry; his first volume, Poems, was published by C and J Ollier on 3 March. In a friendly spirit, he gave a copy to Abbey, who told him when they next met, “Well, John, I have read your book, & it reminds me of the Quaker’s Horse which was hard to catch, & good for nothing when he was caught – So, Your Book is hard to understand & good for nothing when it is understood.” Years later, when relating the story, Abbey implied the comment had been humorous but Keats had taken it to heart: “Do you know, I don’t think he ever forgave me for uttering this Opinion.” The book sold very badly and Keats soon left for another publisher, Taylor and Hessey.

It was around this time that the Keats brothers decided to move to the healthier area of north London, settling in Hampstead. Both George and Tom had been employed by Abbey but left their jobs before the move. In Hampstead, the brothers made numerous friends, most notably Charles Wentworth Dilke and his wife Maria. George Keats’s departure from Abbey’s business also marked the beginning of various schemes to make money, one of which required some of John’s inheritance. The next year, he would marry and move to America.

In April 1817, shortly after giving Abbey his first book, Keats embarked on a four-month tour through Carisbrooke, Canterbury, Hastings, etc He also wrote the first books of Endymion and other compositions. The unaccustomed solitude and intense work affected Keats deeply. For the first time in his life, he was able to focus completely on his poetry and realize both the extent of his own ambition and ability. Touching upon his own native genius reassured him that the decision to risk all for a literary career was indeed worthwhile; however, the solitude affected him enough to send him back to the reassuring comfort of Tom’s companionship. His friend, the painter Haydon, would encourage Keats to seek as much solitude as possible while writing. However much he personally needed the support of his brothers, it could not help his poetic development. But the lonely, grinding work of creation, of writing and editing new lines, was difficult. The early losses of his parents and grandparents had undeniably fostered the strong bond between the Keats children; only death would break it. Despite Haydon’s kind advice, the brothers would stay together until George’s emigration and Tom’s death. Keats could not help but become overly involved in his brothers’ lives, often to the sacrifice of his writing and peace of mind.

The trip had another salutary affect upon Keats’s life. During his travels, he first met Joseph Severn, the young painter who would eventually nurse him during his final illness in Rome. Severn was immediately struck by Keats’s genius, which seemed to manifest itself in his ability to literally feel the poetic essence of all things. Haydon confirmed Severn’s impression: “The humming of the bee, the sight of a flower, the glitter of the sun, seemed to make his nature tremble!” This was a very Wordsworthian attribute, as Keats surely understood. He admired much of Wordsworth’s work, but his own love of Elizabethan wordplay gave his poetry an extravagance and sensuality which Wordsworth lacked.

Keats also met Benjamin Bailey and Charles Brown. In September, Keats stayed with his new friend Bailey at Oxford and wrote the third book of Endymion; the fourth book would be completed in late November. Bailey was easily the wealthiest of Keats’s new friends and his lodgings were comfortable and cheerful. They were also full of the books which Keats loved. His writing progressed largely because of Bailey’s own work schedule. Bailey would begin his studies directly after breakfast and Keats would also take up his pen. Later in the afternoon, he would read his work to Bailey and they would talk and go for long walks. Like Severn, Bailey genuinely admired Keats. His open appreciation encouraged the shy poet’s work and conversation. Keats rarely spoke of personal matters to anyone but, while in Oxford, he opened up to Bailey. His young friend did not gain a favorable impression of George or Tom, who were at the time having a far too expensive holiday in Paris, complete with a visit to an infamous brother and gaming house. Bailey also learned that Abbey was discouraging Fanny from meeting with her brothers. In response, Keats continued to write his sister, reassuring her that she was both his “only sister” and “dearest friend.”

This time in Oxford allowed Bailey to offer insights into Keats’s character which are free of condescension or exaggeration: “The errors of Keats’s character, – and they were as transparent as a weed in a pure and lucent stream of water, – resulted from his education; rather from his want of education. But like the Thames waters, when taken out to sea, he had the rare quality of purifying himself;….” He was also aware of Keats’s innately generous nature; the poet “allowed for people’s faults more than any man I ever knew.”

Their readings together also confirmed Bailey’s understanding that, though his own education was more vast, Keats’s power of insight was infinitely greater. Destined for a career in the Church and intensely studying theology, Bailey engaged Keats sin many religious talks. The poet was a skeptical believer, but always open to new ideas. The time at Oxford was allowing him to think deeply and consistently about his poetic instincts. He also began to closely study his earlier verse, attempting to create his own philosophy of poetry. The impact of the month in Oxford on Keats’s development as a man and poet was immense. It marked a new understanding of his desires and purpose, and a new dedication to a literary career. But when he returned to London at the start of the Oxford Michaelmas term on 5 October, it was with noticeable regret. George and Tom had also returned to their cramped rooms. Keats enjoyed his brothers’ companionship, but the long hours of work he had done in Oxford could not be replicated here. The noise and lack of privacy made poetry nearly impossible. At first, he took long walks around the neighborhood, visiting Haydon and Hunt. His old friends were quarreling, with Hunt criticizing Haydon’s paintings and Keats’s Endymion. “I am quite disgusted with literary Men,” Keats wrote to the sympathetic Bailey.

But there was another problem as well, a mysterious one which exacerbated his impatient and frustrated mood. Some biographers believe that Keats had contracted a venereal disease while in Oxford. He was particularly ill at Hampstead in October, and treated himself with mercury, writing to Bailey, “The little Mercury I have taken has corrected the Poison and improved my Health.” The infection lasted for two months, for he mentioned it again to Bailey in late November. There was also a letter in late October in which Keats joked about some sort of sexual experience. In this letter, he also remarks upon inquiries about his health; several friends had supposed he was suffering the pangs of romantic love, but he assured Bailey it was quite the opposite. This issue is discussed at length in Robert Gittings’ biography of Keats. The poet’s sexual experience has always frustrated biographers, but the bawdy contents of several letters and poems suggests that Keats had some experience.

(It is the use of mercury which biographers have used to support the theory of venereal disease. As Keats had occasion to know from the lectures at St Guy’s, mercury was used to treat syphilis and gonorrhea. However, it was also used to treat common respiratory illnesses. Since Keats spent the latter days of October indoors completing Endymion, it is possible he merely had a cold. It’s impossible to know the truth of the matter; for opposing views, read Robert Gittings’s biograpy and Walter Wells’s medical study.)

The forced rest of October allowed him to continue, though with interruption, the development of his philosophy. He could now read and critique even his great heroes Wordsworth and Coleridge; his contemporaries Shelley and Byron were also studied. Keats was now confident enough of his own abilities to judge their innate worth. He felt himself to be charting a new path, while growing increasingly frustrated with the constraints of Endymion. Taken as a whole, the work is inconsistent and often frustrating, but there are passages of great beauty and power. Reading it, we can witness the young poet (and remember, Keats was about to turn just 22) struggling to find his natural voice, finding it, and then developing its consistency.

But in the final months of 1817, even as he recovered from his mysterious illness, he had a more pressing cause for worry – his brother Tom was ill, and becoming more so, in a ghastly repeat of their mother’s death. Tom’s illness would come to occupy his brother’s thoughts for most of the next year. In December 1817, there was a welcome distraction – the chance to meet his great hero Wordsworth. Haydon arranged the meeting and later famously described it: “I said he has just finished an exquisite ode to Pan – and as he had not a copy I begged Keats to repeat it – which he did in his usual half chant, (most touching) walking up & down the room – when he had done I felt really, as if I had heard a young Apollo – Wordsworth drily said – ‘a Very pretty piece of Paganism’ – This was unfeeling, & unworthy of his high Genius to a young Worshipper like Keats – & Keats felt it deeply – so that if Keats has said any thing severe about our Friend; it was because he was wounded – and though he dined with Wordsworth after at my table – he never forgave him.” The above description is quite famous but there is reason to doubt its accuracy. Haydon first told the story decades later; his journals at the time make no mention of it. Also, Keats’s attitude towards Wordsworth did not noticeably change. It is clear from other accounts that some exchange occurred between the two poets, but it seemed more to amuse Keats than offend him. He was now confident enough of his own abilities to recognize Wordsworth’s less attractive traits.

In mid-December, George and Tom traveled to Teignmouth for Tom’s health. The tuberculosis that had killed their mother was not yet suspected in the youngest Keats; but he was ill and seemed to grow worse as the weeks passed. Keats spent the next two months revising and copying Endymion and attending lectures by the great critic William Hazlitt. Endymion was published in late spring by Taylor and Hessey. His brother’s declining health brought Keats to Teignmouth in March, and he spent the next two months there, nursing Tom while writing Isabella, or the Pot of Basil. Bailey invited him to Oxford again; he had read Endymion several times and was impressed enough to write a glowing review for a local paper. But Tom’s condition prevented the trip.

Meanwhile, George was planning his wedding to Georgiana Wylie and their emigration to America. Of his inheritance of £1700, he would leave £500 behind; this was to pay his outstanding debts and give his brothers extra money. It was also repayment of various loans Keats had made him over the years. George married on 28 May 1818, with Keats signing the register as witness. Three weeks later, George and his new wife left England.

For the first time in their young lives, the brothers were split apart. Keats felt the separation keenly. Their orphaned upbringing had made them extraordinarily close and now George was gone, Fanny was locked away with Abbey’s family, and poor Tom was dying, as Keats finally admitted to himself. They had originally hoped for a recovery, perhaps spurred by a trip to the warm climates of Portugal or Italy, but the plans came to naught. He wrote in a maudlin mood to Bailey: “I have two Brothers, one is driven by the ‘burden of Society’ to America, the other, with an exquisite love of Life, is in a lingering state. I have a Sister too and may not follow them, either to America or to the Grave.”

Keats’s affection for Georgiana gave him some consolation; just twenty years old upon leaving England, she had already impressed him with her kind, warm-hearted nature and appreciation of his work. Also, Tom had made plans to return to London and allow their landlady Mrs. Bentley to nurse him at Well Walk. This would allow Keats the opportunity to travel with Charles Brown, whose acquaintance he had made in the fateful summer of 1817. They toured the Lake District for several weeks, and then did an extensive walking tour of Scotland. It was a wonderful trip for the poet. Not only was he distracted from his personal problems, but he and Brown became close friends. And the beautiful landscapes he encountered inspired his writing. He described them in a lengthy letter to Tom: “….[T]hey make one forget the divisions of life; age, youth, poverty and riches; and refine one’s sensual vision into a sort of north star which can never cease to be open lidded and steadfast over the wonders of the great Power. ….I never forget my stature so completely. I live in the eye; and my imagination, surpassed, is at rest. ….I shall learn poetry here and shall henceforth write more than ever.”

These were indeed prophetic words, foreshadowing his incredible accomplishments of 1819. This trip, like his tour of 1817 and subsequent month in Oxford, marked the next stage of Keats’s life. Brown would become a major figure, both friend and supporter to the poet.

In mid-July, Keats wrote a long letter to Bailey which should be noted since it contains the poet’s oft-quoted remarks about women. Keats had been dismissive of the fairer sex in an earlier letter, which upset Bailey; now he was reflective, seeking to understand his own contradictory feelings. His current reading of Burns and Dante had also affected him. And he understood his own character well enough to tell Bailey, “I carry all matters to an extreme.” Regarding women: “Is it not extraordinary? When among Men I have no evil thoughts, no malice, no spleen – I can listen and from every one I can learn – my hands are in my pockets I am free from all suspicion and comfortable. When I am among Women I have evil thoughts, malice, spleen – I cannot speak or be silent – I am full of Suspicions and therefore listen to no thing – I am in a hurry to be gone – You must be charitable and put all this perversity to my being disappointed since Boyhood – ….I must absolutely get over this, – but how? The only way is to find the root of the evil, and so cure it.” This attitude has been much discussed by biographers and critics, but seems understandable enough. As a shy young man with limited experience of women as well as a lingering defensiveness regarding his height (Keats was about five feet tall), his feelings were necessarily conflicted.

A few days after completing this letter, the rigors of the tour finally caught up with him. He caught a severe cold which turned into acute tonsillitis. He saw a doctor at Inverness on 6 August who advised him to return to London. Keats did so, and the ten day sale from Cromarty to London, with its enforced rest, restored some of his health. But bad news had arrived in Scotland for him. Tom’s doctor had asked the Dilkes to send for Keats; his brother’s condition was now dire. Brown wrote back that Keats was already on his way home. He arrived in London unaware and cheerful, meeting Severn in the city and then traveling back to Hampstead. His first stop was the Dilke household, where he made a great impression on Mrs. Dilke; Keats was “as brown and as shabby as you can imagine; scarcely any shoes left, his jacket all torn at the back, a fur cap, a great plaid, and his knapsack. I cannot tell you what he looked like.” They told him about Tom’s condition and he immediately left for Well Walk.

Nursing Tom was now his main task, but his own sore throat soon returned. Keats began to take larger doses of mercury under the advice of Tom’s doctor. They feared his ulcerated throat might turn out to be a syphilitic ulcer; doctors mistakenly believed there was a connection between gonorrhea and syphilis. The mercury had its own side effects, including nervousness, sore gums, and a bad toothache. Keats discontinued the medicine in late September. He spent several weeks in near seclusion, venturing to London once to ask Abbey to allow Fanny to visit Tom. When not brooding over his brother’s too brief life, he could consider the cruel reviews of Poems and Endymion which had appeared in the press.

The influential Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine had published a scathing criticism of the ‘Cockney School of Poetry’, into which they lumped both Hunt and Keats. Keats did not appreciate the link; his own development had taken him far from Hunt’s aesthetic. But he was not destroyed by the review, as later writers would imply. The review itself made numerous references to his humble middle-class origins and apothecary training. Blackwood’s would return to this snide characterization continuously. And it was all because of Bailey’s misguided loyalty. At a dinner party with John Lockhart of Blackwood’s, who published reviews under the anonymous ‘Z.’, Bailey heard Lockhart comment that Keats shared Hunt’s poetry and politics. In their long talks and letters, Keats had confessed his fear of exactly this criticism to Bailey, and now Bailey jumped to his friend’s defense. Attempting to distinguish the two men, he discussed Keats’s life, giving Lockhart ammunition for his attack. Realizing his blunder, Bailey asked Lockhart to keep the information to himself, which the critic did. After all, the review did not appear under his name. Blackwood’s review was by far the worst; other reviewers were content to simply discuss the poetry itself. It was of too new a type for immediate popularity, but some acknowledged Keats’s obvious talent, merely criticizing the path he had chosen. For Keats himself, the works reviewed had long since been abandoned in an aesthetic sense. They were the products of his youth, his idealistic experimentation, his first attempts at poetry; he had already left them behind. He was also leaving behind another part of his youth, the close companionship and support of his brothers. George was gone to America and Tom was dying. Keats could no longer define himself as an older brother and rely upon their encouragement. He would soon be completely alone. He would also compose some of the most beautiful poetry ever written.

As if Keats’s return home was not traumatic enough, with Tom’s illness and his own emotional and physical stress, another event occurred which had a profound impact upon the poet. He met Charles Brown’s former tenants, the Brawne family. Brown and the Dilke family each owned half of a double house in Hampstead called Wentworth Place. Brown rented out his half when he left on annual vacations, as he had with Keats that summer; when he returned, the Brawnes moved to Elm Cottage, a brief walk away. But while they had lived at Wentworth Place, they had become close friends with Keats’s friends, the kindly Dilke family. The Dilkes had spoken often of Keats, praising him in the highest terms. And so when the Brawne family finally met the esteemed young Mr Keats, they were prepared to like him.

Mrs Brawne was widowed; she lived with her 18 year old daughter Fanny, 14 year old son Sam and 9 year old daughter Margaret. The teenaged Fanny was not considered beautiful, but she was spirited and kind. She was also a realist and immensely practical, perhaps as a result of her family’s straitened circumstances. She took great care with her appearance and enjoyed flirting with young admirers. As Hampstead was close to an army barracks, there were numerous military dances throughout the year. Fanny was a popular participant; when they first met, Keats was struck by her coquettish sense of fun, and it later pricked his jealousy too often for comfort. My greatest torment since I have known you has been the fear of you being a little inclined to the Cressid,” he would tell her later, referring to Chaucer’s infamous flirt.

They met at the Dilkes’ home, as Fanny later recalled, and “[Keats’s] conversation was in the highest degree interesting and his spirits good, excepting at moments when anxiety regarding his brother’s health dejected them.” Indeed, Keats, whatever his first impressions of young Miss Brawne, was too caught up with his younger brother’s decline to ponder any attraction. By the end of November, with Tom close to death, Keats spent nearly every waking moment at Tom’s bedside. The little rooms at Well Walk, once the scene of close companionship for the brothers, were now haunted with disappointment, despair and grief. When Tom died on 1 December, Keats was worn and numb. The memories of Tom’s terrible, lingering illness would never leave him; Keats was too sensitive and brooding to ever forget them.

But he at least had a welcome distraction in Fanny Brawne . Eager to escape Well Walk, he gladly accepted Brown’s invitation to share Wentworth Place with him. This was not charity on Brown’s part; Keats paid him the normal rate for lodging. Since the Dilkes’ were now next door, Keats visited with more frequency; and each time, the brown-haired, blue-eyed Fanny made a greater impression. She both confused and exasperated Keats, and therein lay her attraction. He simply could not understand her. In mid-December, two weeks after Tom’s death, he wrote a long letter to George and Georgiana in America. Its contents spanned a fortnight and Fanny is notably mentioned: “Mrs Brawne who took Brown’s house for the summer still resides in Hampstead. She is a very nice woman and her daughter senior is I think beautiful, elegant, graceful, silly, fashionable and strange. We have a little tiff now and then – and she behaves a little better, or I must have sheered off.” And later the poet gives a more vivid description: “Shall I give you Miss Brawne? She is about my height with a fine style of countenance of the lengthened sort – she wants sentiment in every feature – she manages to make her hair look well – her nostrils are fine though a little painful – her mouth is bad and good – her Profile is better than her full-face which indeed is not full but pale and thin without showing any bone – her shape is very graceful and so are her movements – Her arms are good her hands badish – her feet tolerable…. She is not seventeen – but she is ignorant – monstrous in her behavior flying out in all directions, calling people such names that I was forced lately to make use of the term Minx – this I think not from any innate vice but from a penchant she has for acting stylishly. I am however tired of such style and shall decline any more of it.” And, for a time, it seems he did try to dismiss Fanny from his mind. She rates only a passing mention in a mid-February letter to George (he and Fanny have an occasional ‘chat and a tiff’). Poetry had once more become a consuming passion. But it would only be a matter of time before both Fanny and poetry occupied positions of equal importance in his life.

Fanny was no poet, nor did she aspire to the title. But as their acquaintance grew and deepened, she developed a keen appreciation and respect for Keats’s work. Whether she enjoyed it because it was written by the young man she loved, or because she recognized its greatness, we do not know; but her encouragement – and that of his friends – was welcome. (And it may be that Keats preferred Fanny’s decidedly non-poetic conversation. He had, after all, commented, “I have met with women who I really think would like to be married to a Poem and to be given away by a Novel.” If Fanny loved him, she loved him as John Keats alone and that won his gratitude.)

Throughout the winter of 1819, Keats worked for hours at his desk. In January, The Eve of St Agnes was completed and, a month later, The Eve of St Mark. He also worked on the ambitious Hyperion until early spring; he would leave it deliberately unfinished.

On 3 April 1819, he was suddenly forced into even closer quarters with the baffling Miss Brawne. The Dilkes decided to move to the city center and rented their half of Wentworth Place to Mrs Brawne and her children. Fanny was now a next door neighbor and her presence came close to intoxicating Keats. From April onward, their romance blossomed. Keats would interrupt his serious poetry to write quick sonnets to Fanny, including the famous Bright star ! would I were steadfast as thou art. Most of these works dwell upon her physical charms, but they also celebrate the enjoyment and abandon he found in her company. It was inevitable that his first love affair would consume him. Once he allowed love to take hold, Keats dedicated himself to it with his trademark intensity. In turn, he was given new impetus, – new inspiration, – new insight into his own emotions and the world itself. His poetry began to reflect this new maturity and power.

In late April, he began composing one of his best-loved works, La Belle Dame Sans Merci . The story of an enchantress and the knight she lures to his doom, it is an evocative and beautiful work, justly celebrated. But even it gives no hint of the great works to come; Keats himself considered it mere light verse and, in a letter to George, dismissed it with a joke. Then, in the space of a few weeks, he composed three of the most beautiful works of poetry ever written – Ode on a Grecian Urn , Ode to a Nightingale and Ode on Melancholy . The story of the composition of Ode to a Nightingale, as well as an image of Keats’s original draft, can be read at the Keats: Manuscripts page.

These works have been subject to much critical analysis, but the fact remains that – their technical merit aside – they are, quite simply, beautiful. They remain the ultimate expression of Keats’s genius and secured his reputation as a great poet. But this vindication of his early promise did not result in immediate acclaim. There was no fanfare, or even immediate publication. Instead, there were more long hours at work, stolen moments with Fanny, and Brown’s cheerful company. Mrs Brawne had by now realized the serious course of Keats and Fanny’s relationship; she could not have been very pleased. Keats was a kind and intelligent young man, but he was poor and his chosen career offered little hope of success. But her own good nature could not prevent a love match. She grew fond of the poet and later nursed him through his illness.

But Brown was not happy about the relationship. He disliked Fanny, perhaps out of jealousy because she consumed much of Keats’s time and thought. Perhaps, too, he understood the depth of Keats’s feelings and Fanny’s casual, flirtatious attitude with other men (Brown included) indicated a far more shallow attachment on her part. He did not encourage their courtship and, amongst the poet’s friends (with the exception of the Dilkes), Fanny was viewed somewhat askance. They noticed her teasing behavior and the depression and jealousy it aroused in Keats. Distracted by such antics, how could Keats write?

For his part, Keats was not unaware of their friendly concern but knew himself too well to be bothered. He had confessed his extreme nature to Bailey over two years past and had come to relish it; it provided the force for his poetry (“the excellence of every Art is its intensity,” he once wrote.)

He continued writing, completing the Ode on Indolence probably in early June. Its epigraph is from Matthew 6:28, in which Jesus urges his followers not to be anxious: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.” And its inspiration was found in a letter he had begun to George and Georgiana in mid-March. He had written: “This morning I am in a sort of temper indolent and supremely careless…. Neither Poetry, nor Ambition, nor Love have any alertness of countenance as they pass by me: they seem rather like three figures on a greek vase – a Man and two women – whom no one but myself could distinguish in their disguisement. This is the only happiness; and is a rare instance of advantage in the body overpowering the Mind.” The Ode to Psyche was completed next. When summer finally arrived, Keats had gone through a period of sustained achievement. He also became unofficially engaged to Fanny. But mid-summer brought the potential for a new tragedy. He experienced the first signs of tuberculosis, the disease which had already claimed his mother and younger brother and would eventually kill him.

Living with his good friend Charles Brown, and with his new love next door, Keats had reason to believe the tragedies of the past were safely behind him. His poetry had matured with stunning force; the risky rejection of a medical career could soon be justified, even to the skeptical Abbey. And though his first volume had earned bad reviews from the mainstream press, he had high hopes for his next collection. The pressing problem of money could not be forgotten, of course; it drove him to Shanklin in the Isle of Wight for the summer. This holiday in cheap lodgings saved money but it also allowed Keats uninterrupted time to write.

He worked on part one of Lamia and Otho the Great, a play which Brown encouraged as a way for he and Keats to enter the playwriting business. It was their hope that plays might be more profitable than poetry. Keats enjoyed visiting the theater with his friends and especially admired the great English actor Edmund Kean. He was willing to try his hand at drama. Unfortunately, Otho was never completed. As for Lamia, it is a beautiful work, and starkly embodies Keats’s comment to Woodhouse: ‘Women love to be forced to do a thing, by a fine fellow.’ The poem is a realistic depiction of love as a violent and destructive force, often contradictory and inexplicable. The treatment of sexuality is also striking. For those later shocked by the intensity of Keats’s love letters to Fanny Brawne, Lamia reveals a poet reveling in the complexities of love.

In August, Keats left the Isle of Wight for Winchester. Here he wrote the second part of Lamia and the beautiful ode To Autumn. The latter remains one of his most famous works: Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, And still more, later flowers for the bees, Until they think warm days will never cease, For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep, Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers: And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep Steady thy laden head across a brook; Or by a cyder-press, with patient look, Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, – While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue; Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn Among the river sallows, borne aloft Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft The red-breat whistles from a garden-croft; And gathering swallows twitter in the skies. Keats also began The Fall of Hyperion; however, he became unsatisfied with the concept and abandoned the work. The momentous year 1820 would end as it had begun, in thrall to the story of Hyperion. Reading the two works now, one realizes the enormous growth of Keats’s talent in a single year.

It is important to remember that he was just twenty-three years old, and already composing at a rapid pace while further developing his poetic philosophy. His love of the extravagant wordplay of the Elizabethans was now tempered by his own maturity. Personal grief and worry had made him older than his years. But he also possessed an innate love of life, the Wordsworthian celebration of the natural world which Haydon had noted. Keats was now able to draw these disparate influences together and create his own unique philosophy. In him, the school of life, with all its troubles and triumphs, had an apt pupil. Rarely has a poet so beautifully captured the natural world in all its glory.

Yet this ability to translate an affinity for nature into lasting art is not Keats’s only claim to greatness. The natural world of human emotion was also fertile ground for his imagination; indeed, he claimed all of Creation as his playing-field. It is both touching and awe-inspiring to take stock of his ambition – and to realize how often, against impossible odds, he claimed victory. In our own time as well, it is useful to note that Keats never attended a creative writing class nor a poetry seminar; he was never taught how to write poetry, just as his hero Shakespeare never attended a playwriting course. The word ‘genius’ is used very casually these days, but it is a precious and rare commodity. Keats possessed it, that spark of intuition and imagination which made his work immortal.

But the adulation of later generations was not Keats’s concern in the autumn of 1819. He returned to Hampstead in October and was soon officially engaged to Fanny Brawne. Their meeting after his three months’ absence overwhelmed Keats; ‘you dazzled me’, he wrote to Fanny. She was still a tease and deliberately stoked his jealousy. The poet remained torn between his work and his love. The holiday peace which had aided his poetry disappeared the moment he saw Fanny. Marriage was now their only option.

The prospect of marriage brought fresh scrutiny of his financial woes. He had to make money from writing; even a small success would be welcome. He met with his publishers again in November and plans were made for another book of poems. Keats also borrowed numerous works of sixteenth-century history from Taylor to research the Earl of Leicester. Brown’s earlier push towards playwriting for profit had helped spark a new ambition in Keats. Now he planned to write a play about Elizabeth I ‘s true love, and the choice of Shakespeare’s time was perhaps deliberate. Above all else, Keats admired Shakespeare’s universality, his realism, the ability to create high drama from human emotion rather than outlandish deeds. He now intended to become a playwright like his idol, using the years of poetry as a school of sorts, preparation for the real achievements which lay ahead. He wrote to Taylor that he hoped to finish soon, ‘if God should spare me.’

In January, his brother George returned from America to borrow more money from Keats, who could ill afford it. He came to an agreement with Abbey over the final settlement of his grandmother’s estate; the end result was very little, and Keats gave most of it to George. There was a new distance between the brothers. Though younger, George was married and settling into his own business while Keats could not afford to marry Fanny. ‘George out not to have done this,’ Keats remarked to Fanny about the loan, ‘he should have reflected that I wish to marry myself – but I suppose having a family to provide for makes a man selfish.’ To Brown he was more bitter: ‘Brown, he ought not to have asked me.’ George himself told his brother, ‘You, John, have so many friends, they will be sure to take care of you!’ Keats was careful to keep his own troubles secret, not wishing to add to George’s worries. His letters to George and Georgiana, both before and after George’s January 1820 visit to England, are wonderful documents – engaging, witty, profound, but rarely does Keats admit to any depression and worry. His protective instinct towards his siblings would never disappear. THE FINAL YEAR The trauma of Keats’s boyhood prepared him for the anxieties which marked the last year of his life. The fact that much anxiety was of a financial nature, and thus completely unnecessary (since his inheritance was actually greater than Abbey revealed), is sadly ironic. But the problems and distractions which would have destroyed a lesser poet merely spurred Keats on, driven by his ambition and the stark need for success. In February 1820, however, this drive was checked by something more ominous than poverty.

The next month began badly, with a portent of worse to come. Brown’s maid told him that Keats was taking laudanum; when confronted, Keats promised to stop. But while Brown believed Keats took it ‘to keep up his spirits’, the truth was that he used it as a normal pain-killer. The occasional sore throat and cough which had troubled him was still dismissed as a mere cold; but a new tightness in his chest had begun. And on 3 February, Keats had his first lung hemorrhage. The story of this tragic event was later recalled by Charles Brown, who never forgot it. Keats had gown into the city to visit friends and returned at 11 o’clock; it was cheapest to ride outside the stagecoach, which he did, but he lacked a warm coat and the night was bitterly cold and windy. He arrived at Brown’s house in a sort of fever. His friend immediately realized Keats was ill and sent him upstairs to bed. Brown then brought him a glass of spirits; as he entered the room, he heard Keats cough. It was just a slight cough, but Keats said: ‘That is blood from my mouth.’ There was a drop of blood upon his bedsheet. He said to Brown, ‘Bring me the candle, Brown, and let me see this blood.’ Both men looked upon it for a moment; then Keats looked up at his friend calmly and said, ‘I know the color of that blood; it is arterial blood. I cannot be deceived in that color. That drop of blood is my death warrant. I must die.’

Brown never forgot those words, nor the otherworldly calm with which Keats spoke. His friend’s apothecary training and nursing of Tom revealed the illness for what it was; there could be no doubt, no comforting pretence.

Later that evening there was a second hemorrhage, far greater and more dangerous than the first. This was typical of tubercular patients and the second bleeding was often fatal. Keats could not help but cough violently; the cough, in turn, enlarged the area of bleeding and the spread of blood into his mouth was so sudden and thick that he thought he would die then. He said to Brown, ‘This is unfortunate.’ Luckily, he survived the bleeding and was able to rest at Brown’s home for the next several weeks.

The illness could not help but remind him of the responsibilities he still bore. He wrote a batch of letters to his younger sister Fanny, still a ward in Abbey’s home. George had not even visited Fanny while in England, but Keats thought of her often. Now that he was ill and reflective, he felt guilty for not visiting her more. ‘You have no one in the world besides me who would sacrifice any thing for you – I feel myself the only Protector you have,’ he wrote to her. He kept both she and Fanny Brawne apprised of his illness, though he was careful to be cheerful and light-hearted. He was being treated by the surgeon GR Rodd, whom Brown had summoned that fateful night. Rodd prescribed a light diet and bleeding. Keats noted the weakness caused by the bleeding, but followed orders.

At this point, he feared the worst but tried to believe the best. It had been an unusually cold winter; many of his friends had fallen ill. Perhaps there was a possibility he would recover. But the weakness which had settled into him was too pervasive and heavy; it laid upon him. Within a week, he could only manage a quarter of an hour in the garden. And his medical training countered any optimism; he had bled so heavily that first night that his lungs must be damaged. It was realistically impossible to believe otherwise.

There was no hope for it and so he wrote to Fanny Brawne, telling her she was free to break their engagement. Of course, she did not and Keats could not deny his relief: ‘How hurt I should have been had you ever acceded to what is, notwithstanding, very reasonable!’

Still, they were advised by friends and the doctor to keep their visits to a minimum. Keats was to avoid any heightened emotion, any upset, and Fanny might be susceptible to his illness. Also, Brown disliked Fanny and was always possessive of Keats. He now nursed him diligently, and did his best to keep the poet calm and Fanny safely next door.

Keats wrote to his friend James Rice, who had also experienced serious illness: “How astonishingly does the chance of leaving the world impress a sense of its natural beauties on us. Like poor Falstaff, though I do not babble, I think of green fields. I muse with the greatest affection on every flower I have known from my infancy – their shapes and colours are as new to me as if I had just created them with a superhuman fancy -…. It is because they are connected with the most thoughtless and happiest moments of our Lives.'” And in an undated note from the same period, he mused: ‘”If I should die”, said I to myself, “I have left no immortal work behind me – nothing to make my friends proud of my memory – but I have lov’d the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember’d.”‘

There was new impetus for poetry, then, including a gift from BW Procter, whom Hunt had compared to Keats. And Taylor pushed him to select and revise poems for the press. Keats turned to the task with some of his old enthusiasm. But this proved to be too much for his precarious health. The contrast between the powerful writing of a mere few months before with his now weakened and helpless state depressed him. It could not be otherwise. His ill health, the endless fever and weakness, could not be ignored. And Brown’s dislike of Fanny was now open and unavoidable. Part of this stemmed from Brown’s own scandalous behavior; his housemaid was pregnant with his child. He did not want female visitors to his home. But Fanny, who quickly realized the situation, was determined to visit Keats. She did so as often as possible and, against the advice of even her mother, sent him a brief note every night.

The emotional situation would have been difficult even for someone in perfect health. But on 6 March, Keats had a new and dangerous symptom. That night, he experienced violent palpitations of the heart. Rodd recommended a specialist, Dr Robert Bree, who declared Keats to be suffering from a primarily hysterical illness . He did not dismiss the earlier bleeding, but believed it was caused by anxiety. Brown wrote in relief to Taylor that ‘there is no pulmonary affection, no organic defect whatever, – the disease is on his mind.’

Whether Keats believed this is unclear. He had close experience with tubercular patients and extensive medical knowledge of his own. But he could not help but wonder if Bree was correct. Certainly it was a more optimistic diagnosis than he expected. And Bree removed him from the starvation diet, prescribing wine and meat to build strength. He also gave Keats sedatives for his anxiety, primarily opium. This helped ease the pain and tightness of his chest.

A normal diet and pain medication gave Keats back some of his old strength. He was able to work on the volume of poems for Taylor and passed some two months of relative peace. His letters to Fanny Brawne were more confident and playful. He was even able to attend an exhibit of Haydon’s work in Piccadilly, walking over eight miles there and back..

Brown typically rented out his home during the summer when rents were highest. He was especially eager to do so that summer; the impending birth of his child and support for its mother put a strain on his finances. He cast about for somewhere for Keats to stay, but it was Leigh Hunt who came to the rescue. Hunt’s wife was also a consumptive; it is probable that he understood the seriousness of Keats’s condition. But he also realized that everyone, including Keats, had committed to pretending that Keats was not truly ill, and rest and emotional tranquility would cure him. Hunt’s own financial problems had driven him just outside Hampstead, and he arranged for Keats to live just a few doors away. The rent was much cheaper than in Hampstead proper but still within a mile of Fanny’s home. It was also still close to town, so that Keats could continue to advise Taylor and Hessey on his book. Hunt promised to keep close watch upon his friend. And Brown, despite his own troubles, lent Keats £50 for summer expenses; he borrowed the money from his lawyer. He also paid moving expenses and the first weeks’ rent. All of this was on top of forgiving Keats’s household expenses for the last several weeks at his home. Brown then left for Scotland, with Keats accompanying him to Gravesend. They never met again.

The new lodgings had one unbearable defect for Keats – they lacked Fanny Brawne. She was just a mile away, but it might as well have been ten miles. She could not visit his lodgings without a chaperone, and they could not meet at Hunt’s noisy home. During his illness at Hampstead, even when apart, he could still glimpse her occasionally, going about her errands. And they had met quite often and exchanged notes. Now she was too far away to glimpse or hear. Her mother came to check on him, but we have no evidence that Fanny came. Keats himself returned to Wentworth Place just once, to pick up letters for Brown. The strain of seeing Fanny and then parting was too great. He wondered ceaselessly if her feelings had changed, if she still loved him; this emotional distress was exacerbated by his physical decline. And his long-standing distrust of women, his disdain for their flirtatious and teasing behavior, reawakened old suspicions. He now played the role of jealous lover.

His mood darkened so that even occasional visits to town went badly. The young artist Joseph Severn paid the most visits to Keats. But their walks on the Heath grew short as Keats’s depression lingered. At the end of May, he learned of Fanny’s unchaperoned visit to the Dilke home for a party and dance. He could not bear it, and wrote accusatory letters to her. Fanny responded with lively good sense and Keats was soon contrite. “Do not believe me such a vulgar fellow,” he wrote to her. “I will be as patient in illness and as believing in Love as I am able.” But this new resolve could not hold; his own nature worked against it.

He spent June correcting the proofs of his new book. It was a cause to be happy, but as he wrote to Brown, “My book is coming out with very low hopes, though not spirits on my part.” In mid-June he visited the city and was invited to a dinner with Wordsworth. Keats did not dare risk the night air, but he would have been pleased to hear Wordsworth’s praise. Keats was “a youth of promise too great for the sorry company he keeps”, the older poet remarked. On 22 June, a letter arrived from his sister Fanny; there was a new problem with the Abbeys. Keats prepared to visit but, on the way to the town coach, a new fit of bleeding occurred. Dr Bree was wrong after all. This was not a nervous condition, but a real and serious physical problem. With a mouth full of blood, he returned to his rooms. He later went to Hunt’s home but told them nothing. He returned home that night to a replay of the February bleeding; he had a second and far more dangerous hemorrhage. Keats’s landlady summoned Hunt and Keats was moved to the Hunt household at 13 Mortimer Terrace. Dr George Darling was summoned to his bedside. Darling believed Keats was consumptive, and he prescribed the same light diet and blood-letting as Rodd. Bree’s treatment, despite its false emphasis upon Keats’s emotional health, had at least allowed him solid meals and no bleeding. He had regained some of his old strength. But now regular bleeding and scanty diet took their toll anew.

Hunt attempted to lift his spirits but it was hopeless. His household was too noisy and troublesome. The poet’s despondency found echo in his beloved Shakespeare; as he wrote to Fanny: “Shakespeare always sums up matters in the most sovereign manner. Hamlet’s heart was full of such Misery as mine is when he said to Ophelia ‘Go to a Nunnery, go go!’ Indeed I should like to give up the matter at once – I should like to die. I am sickened at the brute world which you are smiling with.” His thoughts dwelt constantly upon thwarted love, at happiness snatched away just as it came near: “If my health would bear it, I could write a Poem which I have in my head, which would be a consolation for people in such a situation as mine. I would show some one in Love as I am, with a person living in such Liberty as you do.” But despondency could be alleviated by something which Keats neither expected nor dared to dream – positive critical reviews of his new book. The book was printed in the last week of June 1820 and was a far greater success than his earlier work; indeed, its reception was as positive as any poet could wish. Even Blackwood’s was somewhat impressed. Taylor had recognized Keats’s genius, writing to his father, ‘Next week Keats’s new Volume of Poems will be published, and if it does not sell well, I think nothing will ever sell again – I am sure of this that for poetic Genius there is not his equal living, & I would compare him against any one with either Milton or Shakespeare for Beauties.’ His friends were equally voluble in praise, but it was the outside reviews which mattered most. After all, Keats needed to impress more than his small circle of companions.

He knew of the strong sales, writing, ‘My book has had a good success among literary people, and, I believe, has a moderate sale.’ But his ill health prevented any real celebration. Recognition and praise for his poetry was a sweet torment. He was seriously ill, possibly dying, at the moment of triumph.

His friends had long suggested a trip to Italy to recover his health. At first, it had been viewed as a chance to calm his spirits and allow needed rest. But now it was recognized as a last chance at recovery. Such trips to warmer climates were common for tubercular patients.

An experience at Hunt’s drove Keats back to Hampstead, but in a most heartbreaking way. A letter from Fanny Brawne was mistakenly opened before being given to Keats. He was immediately and irrationally upset; he cried for hours and told a shocked Hunt that his heart was breaking. His battle with the world had finally broken his spirit. Keats left for Hampstead, walking along Well Walk and past the rooms where Tom had died. He was glimpsed at the end of the street, sobbing into his handkerchief. Finally, he arrived at the Brawnes’ rented rooms at Wentworth Place. He was so ill, exhausted and emaciated that Mrs Brawne flouted society and admitted him. He would spend the next month there and later say it was the happiest time of his life.

That weekend he sent an apology to Hunt and notes to his sister and Taylor. He asked his publisher for any information about a trip to Italy, its cost and when boats sailed; he also sent Taylor a will of sorts, leaving all his things to Taylor and Brown. In this way, he hoped to settle his debts with both men.

Taylor was generous as always, and more than eager to help Keats. He researched the matter and found that Rome was the best place for medical care. A kind Scottish doctor, James Clark, practiced there and Taylor could write ahead to secure his services. Clark already owned Endymion and the 1820 volume of poems. He knew of and admired Keats.

The success of the last volume of poems allowed Taylor to advance money for the trip. He visited Keats on Friday, 18 August and they discussed matters. Keats both dreaded and anticipated the trip. He did not dare believe he would return. The parting from Fanny, with whom he now lived, would be heartbreaking.

He wrote to Brown, asking his closest friend to accompany him to Rome. Some biographers have implied that Brown refused, remaining in Scotland until it was too late to accompany Keats. In truth, he left Scotland early and hurried back to London only to discover his friend already departed. Whether he wrote to Keats to accept his offer or tell him of his acceptance, we do not know.

The journey was made more pressing by the end of August. Keats had another severe hemorrhage and was now confined to bed, nursed diligently by Fanny. Haydon visited and found his friend ‘to be going out of the world with a contempt for this and no hopes of the other.’ The ironic fulfillment of his poetic and romantic dreams – success at last, and the chance to marry Fanny – consumed him. Happiness could be his at last, if not for this inherited illness. Memories of Tom’s lingering end fought with the desire to stay near Fanny. In the end, he could only take his friends’ advice and the final hope of a recovery in Italy.

But who would accompany him? Brown had not returned. His other friends had ready excuses; Hunt, Haslam, and Dilke had families and Haydon was busy. On 12 September, Severn was approached. The young painter had always admired Keats. He had just won the Academy Gold Medal which would allow for a traveling fellowship. A season in Rome could benefit Keats’s health and Severn’s painting. With the enthusiastic and impulsive kindness which marked his character, Severn accepted the charge. Though young and inexperienced in life, he proved to be an admirable nurse for the ailing poet.

The final goodbye to Fanny can only be surmised. But it is clear from surviving letters that she and Keats had fallen even more deeply in love during that last month. The task of nursing him could have destroyed her affection, but instead it was deepened and strengthened. They exchanged gifts; she included a journal and paper so he could write to her and lined his traveling cap with silk. She also gave him an oval marble which she used to cool her hands while sewing; it could also be used by a fevered patient. This marble, which Fanny herself had clasped so often, would rarely leave Keats’s hands in Rome. He did not write to her – he dared not – nor would he open her letters; the pain was too near. But he held the marble constantly.

They sailed on 17 September. Severn had not grasped the seriousness of Keats’s illness; he believed the trip to Rome was a chance for recovery. They shared quarters with two women, with a screen dividing the beds. One of the women, eighteen year old Miss Cotterell, was the classic consumptive, wasted, weak, and glassy-eyed, pale but with a feverish blush on her cheeks and racked by a brutal cough. In contrast, Keats was still not officially diagnosed and often seemed the picture of health. It was only a week or so into the voyage that Severn began to suspect the truth. For all of his outward signs of bonhomie, the poet grew feverish during the night, coughed hard and brought up blood. Perhaps most disturbing to the gregarious and cheerful Severn, Keats’s physical anguish was consuming him mentally. He often stood by himself, staring silently over the dark water. As Severn wrote, ‘He was often so distraught, with moreover so sad a look in his eyes, sometimes a starved, haunting expression that it bewildered me.’

The kind-hearted Severn was torn. He regarded Keats with something approaching awe, well aware of the younger man’s talent – aware, too, that a few London friends thought he may become a rival to Shakespeare. But during the voyage Severn found Keats withdrawn and difficult to reach. The silence reminded Severn of the lack of true friendship between the men. Yet the silence was better than Keats’s sudden and unexpected outpouring of feeling when they arrived at Naples. Suddenly, Severn became aware of another reason for Keats’s mental anguish – it wasn’t simply his ill health, it was also an ill-fated love affair with a young woman in London named Fanny Brawne. Severn knew of Fanny and Keats’s flirtations with her, but he did not know that she and Keats were engaged. The engagement was known only to Fanny’s mother, who had helped nurse the poet in London.

The first night in Naples (also Keats’s birthday) found both Severn and Keats writing letters home. Severn interrupted his, to their mutual friend William Haslam, when Keats wished to talk again. There are oblique references in Severn’s letter of Keats’s ‘heavy grief’, but nothing more. The conversation soothed Keats but gave Severn fresh cause for concern. Keats’s own state of mind can be further guessed by reading his letter from that evening, to Charles Brown. “I am afraid to write to her – to receive a letter from her – to see her hand writing would break my heart – even to hear of her any how, to see her name written would be more than I could bear,” he told his friend. His “imagination” was “horridly vivid about her – I see her – I hear her….” It is clear Keats was thinking only of Fanny Brawne, and she was undoubtedly the focus of his conversation with Severn.

These confessions made Severn believe that the poet’s problems were caused as much by love as physical disease. This opinion was already shared by Keats’s friends and doctor, and indeed the poet himself came to believe it. In the text of the letter to Brown, Keats had written:”‘My dear Brown, I should have had her when I was in health, and I should have remained well”. He also believed his younger brother Tom had died as much from a broken heart as consumption. The power of love in Keats’s universe was thus life-altering, and life-threatening. This belief gave Severn some optimism since heartache was not as alarming as consumption. But he was disturbed by the intensity of Keats’s feelings and their affect upon his health.

They were entertained at Naples by Miss Cotterell’s brother, a city banker. The passengers waited under quarantine before they would be allowed to travel further; the kindly Mr Cotterell shared the quarantine. Later, he took them about the city and gave a farewell dinner party. Their visas arrived from the British Legaton on 6 November and from the Papal Consul General the next day; they left for Rome on the 8th. With an effort at economy, they hired a small carriage and stayed at poor inns along the way. It took a week to cover the 140 miles. Severn often walked alongside the carriage so that Keats could rest inside. He gathered armfuls of wildflowers from the roadside, filling the carriage with their bright colors and scents for the poet. They finally arrived in Rome on 15 November.

Their first stop was at Dr James Clark’s office in the Piazza di Spagna. By coincidence, Clark was writing to Naples for word of his patient. He took an instant liking to Keats, but thought Severn an immature companion. Severn’s light-hearted kindness often made others suspect a lack of practicality, an inability to cope with anything serious. His care of Keats soon proved otherwise.

Clark had arranged for rooms beside the staircase which led to the Church of the Trinita dei Monti, what is now called the Spanish Steps. It was a well-known boarding house. Keats and Severn would share the second floor, which was well-furnished; its only drawback was that it opened directly into the landlady’s rooms on the mezzanine floor. There were three rooms – a large sitting-room which overlooked the piazza, a smaller bedroom with one window overlooking the piazza and the other the steps, and a tiny room in the back which Severn used for painting.

Joseph Severn’s letters from Rome are the definitive account of Keats’s final months. Please click here to read a selection. Keats and Severn both fell instantly under Rome’s spell. The constant crowd below their windows, the hub of the market and mingle of foreign voices, were lively distractions for the poet. At night, he fell asleep listening to Bernini’s fountain outside. Clark’s diagnosis was at first optimistic. He noticed that Keats had trouble with digestion; he also noted his heightened emotions. A firm believer in healthy food and fresh air, Clark prescribed both to Keats. He encouraged the poet to take short walks around the neighborhood; Keats did so and soon met other English visitors. These gentle distractions proved helpful. But his illness had progressed far more than Clark suspected. The trip to Rome could not offer Keats physical health, but it could give him some measure of calm, a respite from the anguish and worries of England.

That Keats did secure some calm can be proven in the last letter he wrote, to Charles Brown on 30 November: My dear Brown, ‘Tis the most difficult thing in the world to me to write a letter. My stomach continues so bad, that I feel it worse on opening any book – yet I am much better than I was in Quarantine. Then I am afraid to encounter the proing and conning of any thing interesting to me in England. I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence. God knows how it would have been – but it appears to me – however, I will not speak of that subject. I must have been at Bedhampton nearly at the time you were writing to me from Chichester – how unfortunate – and to pass on the river too! There was my star predominant! I cannot answer any thing in your letter, which followed me from Naples to Rome, because I am afraid to look it over again. I am so weak (in mind) that I cannot bear the sight of any hand writing of a friend I love so much as I do you. Yet I ride the little horse, – and, at my worst, even in Quarantine, summoned up more puns, in a sort of desperation, in one week than in any year of my life. There is one thought enough to kill me – I have been well, healthy, alert &c, walking with her – and now – the knowledge of contrast, feeling for light and shade, all that information (primitive sense) necessary for a poem are great enemies to the recovery of the stomach. There, you rogue, I put you to the torture, – but you must bring your philosophy to bear – as I do mine, really – or how should I be able to live? Dr Clarke is very attentive to me; he says, there is very little matter with my lungs, but my stomach, he says, is very bad. I am well disappointed in hearing good news from George, – for it runs in my head we shall all die young. I have not written to **** yet, which he must think very neglectful; being anxious to send him a good account of my health, I have delayed it from week to week. If I recover, I will do all in my power to correct the mistakes made during sickness; and if I should not, all my faults will be forgiven. I shall write to **** tomorrow, or next day. I will write to **** in the middle of next week. Severn is very well, though he leads so dull a life with me. Remember me to all friends, and tell **** I should not have left London without taking leave of him, but from being so low in body and mind. Write to George as soon as you receive this, and tell him how I am, as far as you can guess; – and also a note to my sister – who walks about my imagination like a ghost – she is so like Tom. I can scarcely bid you good bye even in a letter. I always made an awkward bow. God bless you! John Keats

note: the asteriks mark names which were omitted by the copyist. The calm acceptance of this letter was a reflection of his new spirit. But it is also worth noting Keats’s profound description of poetry; ‘the knowledge of contrast, feeling for light and shade, all that information (primitive sense) necessary for a poem’ – this description has never been equaled. Poetry could not be forgotten, but he was all too aware that beginning another poem, so tempting to do when confronted with the new experience of Rome, would shatter his fragile calm.

This was yet another aspect of the final tragedy – his poetic impulse was stirred and he was forced to deny it. Severn later remarked that this was his friend’s greatest pain. Soon enough, Keats could not ‘bear any books’ either, for they were painful reminders of immortality. Severn would occasionally read to him (Keats requested Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Holy Dying for ‘some faith – some hope – something to rest on now’) but the poet would not read himself, nor write to anyone.

This new calm impressed both Severn and Clarke; the doctor remarked that Keats was ‘too noble an animal to be allowed to sink.’ But there was little to do for him now. There were occasional flashes of his old humor and wit.

Their dinners were purchased from a nearby restaurant and always badly cooked. One day, with a mischievous smile at Severn, Keats took the dishes and proceeded to empty them out the sitting-room window. ‘Now you’ll see, we’ll have a decent dinner.’ Barely half an hour passed before a new – and delicious – dinner was delivered. Afterwards, their meals were prompt and edible.

But on 10 December, Severn returned from an early walk and woke Keats. Immediately, the poet began to cough and then vomit blood, about two cupfuls. Clark was summoned and promptly bled him. The loss of blood dizzied and confused Keats. When Clark had left, he left his bed to stumble around the rooms, telling Severn, ‘This day shall be my last.’

His companion feared suicide and immediately hid all the sharp objects he could find as well as the laudanum Clarke prescribed. Keats remained delirious for the rest of the day, until finally another violent hemorrhage and bleeding weakened him into calm.

Over the next nine days, he suffered five severe hemorrhages and continued bleedings by Clark. The doctor visited constantly and put Keats on a strict diet, mostly fish. Keats begged for food, saying they were starving him.

Severn tried to comfort his friend, but Keats was now past comfort. He rambled on about Tom’s illness and death, and – even more troubling to the devout Severn – denied any Christian comfort.

The painter described the scenes for eager friends in England: ‘For he says in words that tear my very heartstrings – “miserable wretch I am – this last cheap comfort which every rogue and fool have – is deny’d me in my last moments – why is this – O! I have serv’d every one with my utmost good – yet why is this – I cannot understand this” – and then his chattering teeth.’ And later, ‘I think a malignant being must have power over us – over whom the Almighty has little or no influence – yet you know Severn I cannot believe in your book – the Bible. …Here am I, with desperation in death that would disgrace the commonest fellow.’ When Severn finished a letter to Keats’s publisher Taylor, the poet told him to add a postscript: ‘I shall soon be in a second edition – in sheets – and cold press.’

The slow, sad death in a foreign city was breaking Keats’s wonderful spirit. The frantic months of losing his brothers, falling in love, writing perfectly at last and knowing it – they were too painful to contemplate. All the time spent reflecting upon ‘the vale of soul-making’ had led to nothing but a poverty-stricken death far from everything he loved. Poor Severn could not hope to break this depression.

By now, Clark held no hope of recovery and admitted as much to Keats. The poet’s thoughts turned to suicide once more, driven by his own suffering and memories of Tom’s lingering end. ‘Keats see all this – his knowledge of anatomy makes it tenfold worse at every change – every way he is unfortunate,’ Clark wrote.

Keats begged Severn for the laudanum, at first appealing to Severn’s self-interest. He described Tom’s death in all its depressing detail, – the loss of bodily control, the constant blood and vomit and diarrhea. Severn would be forced to nurse him; he would also neglect his own work, the reason he had come to Rome. But the painter refused the request.

Keats grew angry; he raged at his companion. Severn was keeping him alive against his will. When Severn, not trusting himself, gave the bottle to Clark, Keats turned on the doctor. ‘How long is this posthumous life of mine to last?’ he asked plaintively.

The next month was a slow and steady decline into the final stage of tuberculosis. He coughed hard and constantly, was wracked in sweat, his teeth chattered uncontrollably. Severn nursed him devotedly. Once, Keats awoke while Severn slept at his side.

The candle had gutted; in the dark, he cried out. Severn devised a clever solution; he connected a string of candles so that as one went out, the flame spread to the next.

The next evening, he awoke to hear Keats exclaim, ‘Severn! Severn! here’s a little fairy lamplighter actually has lit up another candle.’ On 28 January, Severn sketched Keats as he slept. The poet would sometimes cry upon waking to find himself still alive.

Though Keats refused to pray himself, Severn prayed beside him. Keats’s calm was broken only by a letter from Charles Brown from which fell a note in Fanny Brawne’s handwriting; the sight shook his nerves. He did not read it, but asked Severn to place it in his coffin along with a purse made by his sister and a lock of Fanny Brawne’s hair. His thoughts now turned to his final resting-place, the Protestant Cemetery beside the pyramid of Caius Cestius.

He asked Severn to visit and describe the place for him. Even today, it remains a place of peace and beauty.

Severn told him of the daisies and violets which grew there, and of the flocks of goats and sheep which roamed over the graves. The description pleased Keats. He asked that one phrase be put upon his tombstone: ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water.’ The phrase was taken from Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster: “all your better deeds / Shall be in water writ.”

The constant handling of Fanny’s marble seemed to calm him. But more importantly, he achieved a kind of peace by considering Severn’s suffering rather than his own. He worried about the effect his illness and death would have on his friend, and tried to cheer him as best he could. ‘[T]hese bursts of wit and cheerfulness were called up on set purpose – were, in fact, a great effort on my account.

I could perceive in many ways that he was always painfully alive to my situation,’ Severn later recalled. As he rushed about caring for Keats, the poet reassured him: ‘Now you must be firm for it will not last long.’

He also – suddenly and surprisingly – wanted books nearby. Severn did not understand why ‘this great desire for books came across his mind’ but ‘I got him all the books on hand’. By now, Keats was unable to read but the very presence of the books acted as a ‘charm’, Severn wrote, and he gladly collected all he could find.

It seemed he would die on Wednesday, 21 February; a new fit of coughing began and he asked Severn to hold him up so he could breathe. But he lingered on for another day. On Friday the 23rd, around four in the afternoon, Severn was roused by Keats’s call: ‘Severn – I – lift me up – I am dying – I shall die easy – don’t be frightened – be firm, and thank God it has come.’

But it did not come for another seven hours, as he rested in Severn’s arms, holding his hand. His breathing was deep and difficult, but he seemed beyond pain. Only once did he speak again, whispering, ‘Don’t breathe on me – it comes like Ice.’ Finally, near 11 o’clock he died, as though he were going to sleep. He was buried just before dawn on Monday 26 February.

Clark had performed an autopsy on Sunday, which revealed Keats’s lungs to be completely destroyed. He also commissioned a death mask. It took three weeks for news of his death to reach home. Later that spring, Fanny Brawne wrote to Keats’s sister about his death: ‘I have not got over it and never shall.’ She wore mourning for several years and spent many long nights walking along the Heath or reading Keats’s love letters. He had given her his precious folio copy of As You Like It; against the FINIS on its last page, she wrote ‘Fanny April 17 1821.’

Keats’s passing created a rift amongst his friends. As his fame as a poet grew, they told competing stories of his life and often exaggerated their influence upon his work. It became commonplace to view Keats as a tragic soul, too sensitive for this world and driven from it by harsh critical reviews. Keats himself would have been furious at such a description.

Rarely has a poet so thoroughly captured life in all its natural glory, without affectation or exaggeration. And rarely, too, has a man lived such an admirable and passionate life. He once remarked hopefully, ‘I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death.’ At a mere twenty-five years of age, John Keats achieved this dream.

SOURCES Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats – Robert Gittings, John Keats – Aileen Ward, Keats: The Making of a Poet – Andrew Motion, Keats – Amy Lowell, John Keats (2 vol) – Robert Gittings, ed, Selected Letters of John Keats and The Odes of Keats

NOTES Several students have written to ask me a simple yet important question – When indicating possession of a word that ends in s, is it correct to repeat the s after using an apostrophe? In other words, which is correct – Keats’s life or Keats’ life? According to the venerable Chicago Manual of Style, either usage is correct but they recommend the former.

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John Keats — A Brief Biography

Glenn everett , associate professor of english, university of tennessee at martin.

Victorian Web Home —> Some Pre-Victorian Authors —> British Romanticism —> John Keats ]

John Keats's mother, brother, and good friend Richard Woodhouse all died of tuberculosis , which was then termed "consumption." He long suspected that he had the disease himself, and when on February 3, 1820, he had a severe hemorrhage of the lungs, he knew that he could not survive another English winter. Despite moving to Rome, he succumbed to "consumption" in the winter of 1821. The realization that he was likely to die an early death gives poignancy to lyrics like "When I have fears that I may cease to be/ Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain" and "O for ten years, to overwhelm myself in poesy!" It also perhaps explains Keats's astounding productivity, for he did not start writing poetry until just a few years before he died.

The son of a liveryman, he was thoroughly working class, not the sort expected to have poetic aspirations. His mother, Frances (Jennings), remarried two months after his father's death in 1804 but left her husband soon after and died in 1810. After their grandmother's death four years later, the brothers were left alone.

At the Clarke school, John was noted for his pugnacity, especially for his size — he was barely over five feet tall. He was apprenticed in 1811 to an apothecary-surgeon, and passed his examination in 1816. As one biographer puts it, he then went on vacation and returned a practicing poet. His fatal illness lasted more than a year before his death early in 1821, so his entire career was to last barely three and a half years. 1818 was in many ways the most eventful year of his life: his brother George married and moved to America; in the summer he went on a walking tour of the Lake district and Scotland with his friend Charles Brown; he met Fanny Brawne, the great love of his life, in the fall, while at the same time nursing his brother Tom, who died in December.

During the first few months of 1819, he wrote his masterworks, including the great odes. Jack Stillinger thinks that

it is this combined experience of suffering, death, and love all at once, against a background of serious conversation, reading, and thinking, that accounts for Keats's sudden rise to excellence in his poetry.

I wonder if anything "accounts" for genius like his.

Incorporated in the Victorian Web July 2000

John Keats’s Life

John Keats was a great English poet, and one of the youngest poets of the Romantic movement. He was born in Moorefield, London in 1795. When he was just 8 years old, his father, Thomas Keats, died. His mother, Frances Jennings Keats, later succumbed to tuberculosis when John was 14. These tragic circumstances had a profound impact on his mind, and they brought him closer to his other siblings: his brothers, Tom and George, and his sister Fanny.

Following the deaths of his parents, Keats found comfort and refuge in literature and art. A voracious reader at Enfield Academy, he developed a close association with the headmaster of the school, John Clarke, who was like a fatherly figure for the orphaned learner. He also encouraged the interest of his young disciple in art and literature.

Later, Keats left Enfield in 1810 to start his career as a surgeon. He completed his medical education, and became a certified apothecary at London hospital in 1816. Though his medical career never really took off, his devotion to art and literature never ceased. Meanwhile, he got acquainted with the publisher Leigh Hunt of The Examiner through a close friend, Cowden Clarke. He moved to Hampstead, London, in 1817, but his friendship with Hunt continued.

The beginning of year 1819 was full of ups and downs for Keats. He got discouraged due to some bad press his long poem “ Endymion ” received from the critics. Shortly after his move to Hampstead, the Brawne family also moved to the area. Fanny Brawne was a beautiful girl five years younger than Keats, and he fell passionately in love with her. They got engaged soon after that. During this period, he composed his famous poems “ Ode on a Grecian Urn ” and “ Ode to a Nightingale . ”

Then, in February of 1820, Keats came down with symptoms of tuberculosis. Fanny nursed him as much as she could. Despite his severe illness, he tried to finish his final poems, and ultimately got outstanding reviews on his poems. However, already heartbroken and depressed, Keats gave up writing due to deteriorating health, and sailed to Italy with his friend Joseph Severn for treatment. But he did not survive and passed away on February 23, 1820. He was buried in Rome.

John Keats’s Works

Keat’s circle of friends, such as Leigh Hunt and Percy Bysshe Shelley , appreciated his poetry and supported him during tough times. Their appreciation and support combined with his reading of Edmund Spenser’s “ Faerie Queene” shaped his writing style .

The themes of Keat’s works were love, beauty , joy, nature, music, and the mortality of human life. Keats published his first collections of poems in March 1817, in which he used a bold and daring writing style. This early collection earned him severe criticism from England’s prestigious publications “ Quarterly Review” and “Blackwood’s Magazine.”

Keats duly took note of this criticism and developed his famous doctrine known as “ Negative Capability.”This idea was a romantic ideal that permitted human beings to go beyond the contemporary social and intellectual constraints and rise above the existing norms.

In 1818, he published his second volume of poems “ Endymion. ” He soon followed that volume up with “ Isabella, ” “ Lamia, ” and “ The Eve of St Agnes, ” which was published in 1820. These collections included his great odes , and also his ambitious Romantic piece “ Hyperion, ” that gained its inspiration from a Greek myth .

John Keats’s Style and Popular Poems

Keats’s diction is highly connotative. His writing style is characterized by sensual imagery and contains many poetic devices such as alliteration , personification , assonance , metaphors , and consonance . All of these devices work together to create rhythm and music in his poems. His most popular poems include “ Ode on Melancholy, ” “ Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to Autumn ,” “ Ode to a Nightingale , ” “La Belle Dame Sans Mercy,” “Imitation of Spenser,” “Hyperion,” and “Isabella.” Among his sonnets , the most popular are “Bright Stars! Would I were steadfast as Thou Art,” “ When I have Fears that I may Cease to be ,” “Endymion,” “The Eve of St. Agnes,” and “Lamia.”

More About Him

Keats did not harness dramatic and narrative power necessary to present individual characters . Instead, he was gifted with lyrical power to present characters with expressive moods . Often, these moods were of pensiveness, romantic sadness, or indolence, as well as ecstatic delight, which can be observed in his great odes.

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John Keats was an English poet who belonged to the period of Romanticism in English literature- dedicated himself to the perfection of poetry. His poetry is marked by the intense use of imagery of classical legend articulated by philosophy. John Keats was born on 31 st October 1795. Along with Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, he was one of the prominent figures of the Romantic poets of the second generation. However, his works were published four years before his death. He died of tuberculosis on 23 rd February 1821 at the age of 25.

Though the critics of his time did not receive his work very well, his reputation as the greatest Romantic grew after his death. At the end of the 19 th century, he was regarded as one of the most beloved English poets, of all poets. He influenced a significant number of poets and writers significantly. For instance, Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentine short-story writer, poet, essayist, and translator, commented that the most significant literary experience he had in his life was his first encounter with the work of Keats.  

A Short Biography of John Keats

John Keats was born in Morefield. He was the son of a hostler and stable keeper, thus born in the stable of the swan and Hoop Inn, London. His father, Thomas Keats, died when he was just eight years old. Adding to the misfortune of John Keats, his mother, Frances Jennings Keats, was also diagnosed with tuberculosis when he was fourteen years old. His life and metal health was greatly influenced by these tragic events and brought him closer to his siblings. He has two brothers Tom and George, and one sister, Fanny.

Keats tried to find ease and escape in art and literature when his parents died. He was an insatiable reader at the Enfield Academy.  Keats was closely associated with the headmaster, John Clark, of the academy as he proved to be a fatherly figure to Keats. Clark encouraged him to develop his interest in the young orphan in literature and art.

In 1810, John Keats withdrew from the Enfield Academy and started pursuing the career of a surgeon. In 1816, he completed his medical education and was appointed as the certified apothecary in the hospital in London. Despite pursuing the medical career, Keats’ devotion to literature and art never ended. In the meantime, through a close friend Cowden Clarke, he became familiar with the editor Leigh Hunt of The Examiner. In 1817, he shifted back to London. However, his friendship with Hunt still continued.

The year 1819 is marked with the ups and downs for John Keats. He received very harsh criticism from the critics on his long poem “Endymion,” which discouraged him a lot. When he moved to Hampstead, he met with the Brawne family. Fanny Brawne, the daughter of the Browne family, was a beautiful girl. Though she was five years younger than Keats, he fell in deep love with her. Soon after, Keats and Fanny Brawne got engaged. It was during this period that Keats wrote his famous poem “Ode to a Nightingale” and Ode to Grecian Urn.”

In 1820, Keats was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He was very well nursed by Fanny Brawne. Though he was severely ill, he tried his best to finish the last poem, and ultimately it received the admiration of a lot of people. However, he gave up writing poetry due to his ailing condition and shifted to Italy for treatment with friend Joseph Severn. He could not survive the disease and died. He was buried in Rome.

John Keats’ Writing style

The writing style of John Keats is overwhelmed by poetic devices such as personification, alliteration, metaphors, assonance, and consonance. These devices are put together, which creates the music and rhythm in the poems. For example, his poem “Ode to the Nightingale” is full of literary devices. Similarly, his poetry is also characterized by sensual imagery . His poems “Lamia,” “Hyperion,” “Ode to the Nightingale,” and “Endymion” are the best examples of sensual imagery.

Moreover, the diction used by Keats is also connotative.  For example, in the poem, “Ode to the Grecian Urn,” Keats implied formal diction: 

“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter: therefore, ye soft pipes, play on …”

The uses of formal diction “ye” in the above lines.

 The odes written by Keats are a unique achievement in poetry. Keats’s odes are usually a lyrical reflection on something that stimulates the poet to encounter his own inner desires, to think about his own longings and their relationship with the harsh reality of the outer world. 

Being the last romantic poet, he shows the typical aspects of Romanticism in his poetry. Though Keats wrote for only three years, the poems he wrote in these three years become the hallmark of the literary canon and make him one of the greatest and most celebrated poets in English Literature. Though the themes of his poems are not concerned with nature, he implied the poetic devices to make his poetry gentle and romantic. Misery, death, love, and nature are the main aspects of Romantic poetry, and the readers also find these aspects in the poetry of Keats’ as well.

Similarly, in Romanticism, we also find the appreciation of past writers, mythology, and Latin. We observe that Keats’s poetry also observes these rules.

Though Keats’ style of writing poetry is unique, his manner of poetry is immensely suggestive of Edmund Spenser. Keats and other traditional Romantics would likely focus on the remote past, ancient myth, and fairy tales to escape from the harsh realities of life and the unwelcoming modern 19 th century. The material of Keats’ poem “Endymion” is found in remote antiquity instead of the Middle Ages. In essence, he used the manner of Middle Ages poetry in his poems “Eve of St. Agnes” and “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” 

  Keats writes his poetry in rhymed iambic pentameter; however, it is not exactly like the simple heroic couplet used by the poet of the previous century. We seldom find end-stops at the end of the poetry. He uses enjambment normally as his verses flow into one another, particularly in a narrative poem. For example, in the poem “Ode to the Nightingale” has the poetic device enjambment as follows: 

 “My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,

Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains.”

 To present the individual characters in the poem, Keats never coupled the narrative and the dramatic power. He would display the characters with expressive moods as he had mastered the lyrical powers. The moods were often romantic, pensive, lethargic, sadness, or ecstatic delight. These moods can greatly be observed in his odes.

The following are the characteristics of Keats’ poetry.

Quest for Beauty

Like other Romantic poets, Keats also focused on understanding and exploring the beauty of nature in his poems. According to Keats, there is beauty in every object of the universe, and as a poet, it is his job to look for it and incarcerate it in his poetry. According to Keats, a person becomes aware of the truth when he identifies and understands the concept of beauty. In his poem “Ode to Grecian Urn,” he writes in the final lines that

 “Beauty is truth, truth beauty — that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

  Emphasis on Ordinary Things

Keats, unlike the Romantic poets, emphasizes on the ordinary and common things in his poetry, particularly in efforts to understand beauty. Though famous Romantic poet, P.B. Shelley wrote about imperceptible things in his poetry, Keats emphasizes the identifiable and close object such as the dew of the season in autumn. Once Keats wrote, in his letter that “If a sparrow comes before my window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel.” This proposes that Keats always look for beauty in the ordinary things like sunset, sunrise, mountain, and valleys, etc. 

Exclusion of Self

While exploring and identifying the beauty of ordinary things in his poetry, Keats disposed of his personality that would dictate his exploration. In doing so, he aligned himself to the father of English Drama, William Shakespeare. Keats found Shakespeare to be able to write about ordinary things as he refrained from expressing fondness to anything.

The six odes that Keats wrote to the physical objects is one of the most famous sets of Keats poetry. These odes are to the urn, autumn, a nightingale, indolence, psyche, and melancholy. These odes are lyrical and are devoted to praising something, thus fall in the Literary and poetic tradition of English odes. The odes are the representatives of the obsession of Keats with exploration and understating the notion of beauty in ordinary things. These odes are the extended imageries, blended with illusory tales about the thing on which they are focusing on. Keats divulges each object and the notion of beauty through the interchange of narration and description.

Works Of John Keats

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6.12: John Keats (1795–1821)

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Learning Objectives

• Analyze Keats’s use of the sonnet form in “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” and “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be.”
• Identify characteristics of Romanticism in Keats’s poetry.
• Compare Keats’s use of nature with other Romantic poets.
• Recognize and identify examples of the richness of imagery for which Keats’s is known in “The Eve of St. Agnes” and “To Autumn.”

Unlike Byron and Shelley,  John Keats  came from a working class background. His father, a stable keeper, died when Keats was eight years old; his mother died of tuberculosis, then called consumption, when he was 14. Keats left school to become an apothecary’s apprentice. He left the apprenticeship to study medicine but soon decided to abandon his studies to pursue writing poetry. Keats cared for his brother Tom during his illness and death from tuberculosis, so it is not surprising that Keats also contracted the illness. Because of his medical knowledge, he recognized that he had a fatal illness.

Portrait by Joseph Severn from Letters of John Keats to His Family and Friends.   ed. Sidney Colvin. Macmillan and Co., Limited. St. Martin’s Street, London, 1925

Keats became acquainted with other writers such as Shelley and literary figures such as Leigh Hunt, in whose journal Keats published his first poem. Keats’s early work was not well received. Several of Keats’s friends, in fact, blamed discouragement caused by the harsh criticism for hastening the poet’s death.

After his brother’s death and with his own health deteriorating, Keats moved into a house in Hampstead with his friend Brown. Through Brown, Keats met  Fanny Brawne , the love of his life. The Brawne family rented the attached house next door to Brown’s house.

During the year he lived here, Keats produced his greatest poetry including “The Eve of St. Agnes,” “Ode to Psyche,” “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode on Melancholy,” “Lamia,”  The Fall of Hyperion , and “To Autumn.” Many critics have noted that Keats produced more great poetry in a year than many poets produce in a lifetime.

Views of the interior of Keats’s house in Hampstead, London, now a museum.

Realizing that his health was failing, Keats decided to move to Rome, hoping that the warmer, drier climate would improve his condition. He traveled to Rome with his friend, artist Joseph Severn. They moved into rooms next to the Spanish Steps, rooms which now house the Keats-Shelley House museum.

Only a few months after his arrival in Rome,  Keats died  with his friend Severn in attendance and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. At his request, his name was not carved into his grave stone. Keats requested that his marker read, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” Severn, who was later buried next to Keats, and Brown decided to add the following inscription to the memorial:

This Grave contains all that was mortal, of a YOUNG ENGLISH POET, who on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his heart, at the Malicious Power of his enemies, desired these words to be Engraven on his Tomb Stone

Severn’s drawing of Keats on his death bed.

These words fueled stories that Keats’s death was hastened by his despair over the brutal critical reviews of his poetry. Shelley’s elegy  Adonais  includes verses attributing Keats’s death to his agitation over the reviews, also adding substance to the stories. A post-mortem, however, revealed that Keats’s lungs had been almost entirely destroyed by tuberculosis.

The graves of Keats and Severn in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome.

• “ The Eve of St. Agnes .”  Bartleby.com . rpt. from  The Poetical Works of John Keats . London. Macmillan.1884.
• “ The Eve of St. Agnes .”  Representative Poetry Online . Ian Lancashire. Department of English, University of Toronto. University of Toronto Libraries.
• “ Ode to a Nightingale .”  Keats-Shelley House . text and audio.
• “ Ode to a Nightingale .”  Representative Poetry Online . Ian Lancashire. Department of English, University of Toronto. University of Toronto Libraries.
• “ On Seeing the Elgin Marbles .”  Representative Poetry Online . Ian Lancashire. Department of English, University of Toronto. University of Toronto Libraries.
• The Poems of John Keats . Ed. E. De Selincourt. New York. Dodd, Mead and Co. 1909.  Hathi Trust Digital Library .
• Poems Published in 1820 by John Keats . Ed. M. Robertson.  Project Gutenberg .
• “ To Autumn .”  Representative Poetry Online . Ian Lancashire. Department of English, University of Toronto. University of Toronto Libraries.
• “ To Autumn .”  Keats-Shelley House . text and audio.
• “ When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be .” Keats’ Literary Reputation. British Library. text and audio.
• “ When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be .”  Representative Poetry Online . Ian Lancashire. Department of English, University of Toronto. University of Toronto Libraries.

“On Seeing the Elgin Marbles”

Even as a very young man, Keats seemed tragically aware of death and of his own mortality, as might be expected in one who had suffered loss of immediate family members. Although the subject of this sonnet is the Elgin Marbles, the focus in the first line is on approaching death. In line 5, the poet compares himself to a sick eagle, looking at the sky, longing to fly, yet unable to do so. In contrast to his own brief life span, the marbles are centuries old, yet even they are marked and worn by time.

Video Clip 9

John Keats.wmv

(click to see video)

View a video mini-lecture about “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles.”

My spirit is too weak—mortality

   Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,

   And each imagined pinnacle and steep

Of godlike hardship tells me I must die

Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.

   Yet ‘tis a gentle luxury to weep

   That I have not the cloudy winds to keep

Fresh for the opening of the morning’s eye.

Such dim-conceived glories of the brain

   Bring round the heart an undescribable feud;

So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,

   That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude

Wasting of old time—with a billowy main—

   A sun—a shadow of a magnitude.

   Yet ‘tis a gentle luxury to weep,

   That I have not the cloudy winds to keep,

   Bring round the heart an indescribable feud;

Wasting of old Time—with a billowy main—

“When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be”

“When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be” is an English sonnet; Keats was more interested in form than many of the Romantic poets, which in turn made him interesting to many Victorian poets who experimented with form. The sonnet consists of three quatrains, each beginning with “when,” and a final couplet, which begins with “then.”

When I have fears that I may cease to be

  Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,

Before high piled books, in charact’ry,

  Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;

When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,

  Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,

And think that I may never live to trace

  Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;

And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!

  That I shall never look upon thee more,

Never have relish in the faery power

  Of unreflecting love!—then on the shore

Of the wide world I stand alone, and think

Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

“The Eve of St. Agnes”

“The Eve of St. Agnes” is a  narrative poem , a poem that tells a story. It is also an example of the  medieval revival , the renewed interest in the Middle Ages evident in some Romantic literature. During the 19th century, many writers idealized the Middle Ages; it seemed romantic and less complicated than the modern world. However, they often had a fairy tale view of medieval times, thinking only of knights in shining armor rescuing fair damsels in distress rather than recognizing the harsh, violent time period that it really was.

This story is set in the Middle Ages and is a type of Romeo and Juliet story of two feuding families and the children who love each other in spite of their families’ enmity. Ambiguity at the end of the story leaves readers to decide whether Madeline and Porphyro “live happily ever after” or whether they freeze in the winter night.

Central to the story is a medieval superstition concerning St. Agnes Eve. This type of superstition—a ritual that allows young girls to find out who their future husband will be—is common in many cultures. In America’s past there have been superstitions and folklore involving sleeping with a piece of wedding cake under your pillow, or peeling an apple and throwing the peel over your shoulder. In the Middle Ages, superstition specified a ritual which, if followed on St. Agnes Eve, would allow a girl to dream of her future husband. Note the specifics of the ritual in Stanza 6. Porphyro, aided by Madeline’s nurse, decides to take advantage of his knowledge that his beloved Madeline will be expecting to see a vision of her true love. Note in Stanza 35, however, how Madeline reacts to the real Porphyro compared with her dream.

“The Eve of St. Agnes” presents the reader with two contrasting worlds, separated by symbolic doors. The poem begins with a description of a harsh, cold landscape in which even nature suffers, focusing on the beadsman, near freezing to death, who prays for the family. A door opens, and the reader is ushered into a warm, colorful world inside the house where the main action takes place. Then in Stanza 41, a door opens again and the lovers leave the castle, taking with them any hint of love and warmth. The poem ends in images of death and cold.

“To Autumn”

Video clip 10.

Keats’s “To Autumn”

View a video mini-lecture on “To Autumn.”

SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

  Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

  With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,

  And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

    To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

  And still more, later flowers for the bees,

  Until they think warm days will never cease,

    For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

  Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

  Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,

  Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

    Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

  Steady thy laden head across a brook;

  Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,

    Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

  Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

  And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

  Among the river sallows, borne aloft

    Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

  Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

  The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

    And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

“Ode to a Nightingale”

While Keats lived in Brown’s Hampstead house, a plum tree grew next to the front door. One evening, Keats was sitting under the tree when he heard a nightingale singing from the tree.

The poem begins by focusing on the speaker, sick at heart and in spirit, envious of the bird’s happiness. The speaker searches for a way to escape the pain of living. In Stanza 2 he considers wine as a means of escape but rejects that possibility.

In Stanza 3, the speaker recognizes that wine will not make him forget the “weariness, the fever, and the fret” of living, hardships that the nightingale has never known. Even in poetry, the speaker does not find an escape from the cares of living. So burdened by the pain of life, the speaker confesses that he has at times been “half in love with easeful death.” He adds that this moment, enraptured by the beauty of the bird’s song, seems an even more tempting time to die. He realizes, however, that in death he would miss the small consolation of this beauty.

In Stanza 7, the speaker exclaims, “Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!” He recognizes that since ancient times people have been enchanted by this same song.

Finally, he imagines the bird flying across the meadow and river, leaving the speaker wondering if he had imagined or dreamed the entire experience.

Key Takeaways

• More interested in poetic form than many Romantic writers, Keats wrote sonnets.
• Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes” is an example of the medieval revival.
• Keats uses nature to express his themes, often themes concerning death.
• What characteristics of Romanticism are evident in Keats’s poetry?
• How does Romantic mysticism appear in the works of Keats?
• How does Keats’s use of nature compare with that of other Romantic writers?

“When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be”

• What does Keats mean when he writes, “When I have fears that I may cease to be”?
• The poet expresses a different fear in each quatrain. What are his three fears?
• His only consolation from his fears is expressed in the final couplet. What is it?
• Why does this poem seem especially sad when we know Keats’s biography?
• Keats is known for the richness of the descriptive imagery in his poetry. Compile a chronological list of the scenes in the poem, and list some of the description included in each scene. (For example, the first scene in the poem is outdoors, with the owl, the rabbit, and the frozen grass.)
• “The Eve of St. Agnes” is a poem of contrasts. List and explain contrasting ideas you find in the poem (for example, youth and old age, warmth and cold).
• Write a character sketch of Madeline, including a physical description, character traits, and actions and motives in the poem.
• Write a character sketch of Porphyro, including a physical description, character traits, and actions and motives in the poem.
• What do you think happened to the lovers?
• “ Afterlife .”  Presenting John Keats . Curated by Libby Chenault and Katherine Carlson, Rare Book Collection, Wilson Library. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
• John Keats 1795–1821 .  Keats-Shelley House . includes images of Romantic writers, manuscripts, first editions.
• John Keats (1795–1821) . Online Gallery: John Keats. British Library. includes images of Keats and of manuscripts.
• “ The Life and Legacy of John Keats .”  Presenting John Keats . Curated by Libby Chenault and Katherine Carlson, Rare Book Collection, Wilson Library. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
• “ Work and Reappraisal .”  Presenting John Keats . Curated by Libby Chenault and Katherine Carlson, Rare Book Collection, Wilson Library. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
• “ John Keats .” Dr. Carol Lowe, McLennan Community College.
• Keats-Shelley House . virtual tour of the house in Rome where Keats was living when he died, now the location of the Keats-Shelley Museum, including information about Keats’s time in Rome
• “ Keats and Brawne: The Romance and Love Letters .” Woman’s Hour. BBC 4.
• “ Keats’s ‘To Autumn .’” Dr. Carol Lowe, McLennan Community College.
• “ Bright Star” Panel Discussion . Stuart Curran, Christopher Ricks, Timothy Corrigan and Susan Wolfson At the New York Public Library Performing Arts Library, 13 September 2009.  Romantic Circles . General Editors: Neil Fraistat and Steven E. Jones Technical Editor: Laura Mandell. University of Maryland.
• “ Chris Dombrowski Reads ‘To Autumn’ by John Keats .”  Poets on Poets . Ed. Tilar Mazzeo.  Romantic Circles . General Editors: Neil Fraistat and Steven E. Jones. Technical Editor: Laura Mandell. University of Maryland. text and audio.
• “ The Eve of St. Agnes .”  LibriVox .
• “ Keats, Shelley, and the ‘Bright Star .’” Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi Lecture at the University of Loyola Chicago, 19 October 2006.  Romantic Circles . General Editors: Neil Fraistat and Steven E. Jones Technical Editor: Laura Mandell. University of Maryland.
• “ Ode to a Nightingale .”  Keats-Shelley House .
• “ On Seeing the Elgin Marbles .”  LibriVox .
• “ The Posthumous Life .”  Keats-Shelley House . audio drama of Keats’s last days in Rome.
• “ To Autumn .”  Keats-Shelley House .
• “ Tom Thompson Reads ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ by John Keats .”  Poets on Poets . Ed. Tilar Mazzeo.  Romantic Circles . General Editors: Neil Fraistat and Steven E. Jones. Technical Editor: Laura Mandell. University of Maryland. audio and text of the poem and commentary.
• “ Wesley McNair Reads ‘When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be’  by John Keats.”  Poets on Poets . Ed. Tilar Mazzeo.  Romantic Circles . General Editors: Neil Fraistat and Steven E. Jones. Technical Editor: Laura Mandell. University of Maryland. audio of the poem and commentary. Additional recordings of this sonnet by Carey Salerno and Ravi Shankar. text and audio.

Concordance

• “ An Electronic Concordance to Keats’s Poetry .” Electronic Ed. Noah Comet. Ed. Jack Stillinger.  Romantic Circles . General Editors: Neil Fraistat and Steven E. Jones Technical Editor: Laura Mandell. University of Maryland.
• John Keats The Odes of 1819 Web Concordance .  The Web Concordances .
• “ The Eve of St. Agnes : a Poem / by John Keats; With a Preface Written for It by Edmund Gosse. Edition limited to 800 copies made upon L.L. Brown’s H.M. paper…printed…from plates made from drawings for each page, designed & lettered by Ralph Fletcher Seymour.  Hathi Trust Digital Library .

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section John Keats

Introduction, general overviews and collected essays.

• Poetry and Complete Works
• Facsimile Editions
• Bibliographies and Reference
• Specialist Journals
• Early Biographies
• Modern Biographies
• Specialist Biographies
• Contemporary Reception
• Posthumous Reception
• Influence of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton
• Influence of Other Earlier Writers
• Contemporary Influences and Dialogues
• Negative Capability and Chameleon Poet
• Egotistical Sublime
• Material Sublime
• Imagination, Duality, Complexity
• The Great Odes
• Sonnets and Other Lyric Poems
• Narrative Poems
• New Criticism
• Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis
• History and Politics
• Medicine and Science
• Music and the Visual Arts

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John Keats by Rachel Falconer , Philip Lindholm LAST REVIEWED: 26 August 2013 LAST MODIFIED: 26 August 2013 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199846719-0078

John Keats (b. 1795–d. 1821), a major British Romantic poet, produced his greatest works within an extraordinarily concentrated period of time—just three and a half years, from 1816 to early 1820. One of the most loved and widely read poets in the English language, Keats is particularly known for his six “Great Odes” (including “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “Ode to a Nightingale”) and sonnets (such as “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” and “Bright Star!”). But Keats himself regarded the long narrative genres of romance and epic as more significant, and he greatly admired Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Milton’s Paradise Lost . During his lifetime, Keats published three collections of poetry: Poems (1817), Endymion: A Poetic Romance (1818), and Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems (1820). He was known to his contemporaries as the author of Endymion , while all but one of the Great Odes were published in the third volume, under the insignificant heading of “Other Poems.” To present-day readers, Keats’s tragically short life is almost as well-known as his poetry, and his status as the quintessential Romantic poet has been sealed by Jane Campion’s film Bright Star ( Campion 2009 , cited under Modern Biographies ), a fictional biography that focuses on the poet’s love of Fanny Brawne. Keats’s letters are likewise widely appreciated for the insights they give into the poet’s life as well as his poetics, and, increasingly, scholars are coming to see the letters as major literary works in themselves. If an earlier generation of readers pictured Keats as an aesthete of delicate constitution and sensibility, current criticism emphasizes his vigorous engagement in politics. He was an active participant in the debates of Leigh Hunt’s radical intellectual circle, which included William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Hamilton Reynolds, and William Godwin, among others. As Jack Stillinger argues in a chapter of The Cambridge Companion to Keats ( Stillinger 2001 , cited under Contemporary Reception ), Keats’s poetry has the distinctive quality of being meaningful to practically everybody, and to each according to his or her own taste (see Imagination, Duality, Complexity ). For the Rossettis, the Great Odes epitomized purely aesthetic pleasure, while for Matthew Arnold, they were rigorously moral and ethical. Scholars in the 20th century variously interpreted Keats’s “To Autumn” as being about the sensual pleasures of the season, about death, or about the battle of Peterloo. Although he had few readers in his lifetime, Keats predicted that he would be “among the English Poets.” That bold prediction seems conservative now as his readership expands to global dimensions.

Both John Barnard and Kelvin Everest provide engaging, well-balanced introductions to Keats’s life and writing. Barnard 1987 considers issues of class and gender and explores Keats’s views on poetry in the context of nineteenth century intellectual debates. Everest 2002 is more expansive on Keats’s poetic techniques, and on his relation to literary predecessors. While acknowledging that Keats was a writer deeply concerned with history, Everest 2002 argues that Keats nevertheless strove to represent modes of experience outside history and time itself. Mighall 2009 , an entertaining biography of Keats, is included in this section because it interweaves a narrative of Keats’s life with texts and critical commentary. Davey 2009 tells the story of Keats’s passionate love of Fanny Brawne, by using Keats’s poems and letters as primary source material. Wolfson 2001 , an edition of The Cambridge Companion to Keats , makes an excellent introduction to the range of critical approaches to Keats, with a good range of essays by major Keats scholars, and an extensive reading list collated by Wolfson herself. De Almeida 1990 is a collection that emphasizes Keats’s humanism; in some of the essays, this approach is offered as a reaction against the deconstructive readings of Keats that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. The bicentenary celebrations of Keats’s birth stimulated the publication of two collections of essays, both demonstrating the strength of interest in Keats’s historical and political contexts, as well as ongoing interest in his poetic technique: O’Neill 1997 emphasizes tensions and paradoxes in Keats’s poetry, while Ryan and Sharp 1998 lays greater emphasis on his moral philosophy. Other collected editions, such as Roe 1995 (see Historicist Criticism from 1990 to the Present ), appear elsewhere in this article when they explore a more particular aspect of Keats’s corpus.

Barnard, John. John Keats . British and Irish Authors. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Considers issues of class and gender, and nineteenth century debates about poetry. An excellent introduction.

Davey, Peter. A Poet in Love . Ilfracombe, UK: Arthur H. Stockwell, 2009.

Narrates Keats’s romance with the enigmatic Isabella Jones and his passionate love of Fanny Brawne, on the basis of Keats’s poems and letters as well as the letters that Fanny Brawne wrote to Keats’s young sister after the poet’s death.

de Almeida, Hermione, ed. Critical Essays on John Keats . Critical Essays on British Literature. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990.

Consists of seventeen essays, of which some had been previously published elsewhere and others were written specifically for this volume. As a whole, the collection argues for Keats’s humanizing place among the greatest English poets, emphasizing Keats’s adherence to the notions of democracy, love, a Renaissance ideal of character, and philosophical humanism.

Everest, Kelvin. John Keats . Writers and Their Work. Tavistock, UK: Northcote House, 2002.

Keats is introduced both through historical context and through attention to poetic technique. Everest is particularly strong on Keats’s influences and intertexts. The arrangement of the texts covered in his study is chronological, and the maturation of Keats’s style and themes and the developments of his personal life are explored in tandem. While it does consider historical contexts, the study offers a humanist rather than a historicist approach.

Mighall, Robert. Poetic Lives: Keats . London: Hesperus, 2009.

A concise and well-written biographical introduction to Keats and his major poetry, arranged into four seasons: spring, summer, autumn, and winter. Poems are quoted in full but are set off from the critical narrative in italic font.

O’Neill, Michael, ed. Keats: Bicentenary Readings . Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997.

A balanced collection of essays, which consider Keats’s poetic techniques, his political and historical contexts, and tensions and conflicts in his ideas about poetry. Includes essays by Michael O’Neill, Nicholas Roe, Fiona Robertson, David B. Pirie, J. R. Watson, Gareth Reeves, Martin Aske, and Timothy Webb.

Ryan, Robert M., and Ronald A. Sharp, eds. The Persistence of Poetry: Bicentennial Essays on Keats . Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998.

An important bicentenary collection, with a focus on historical contexts, poetic technique, and Keats’s moral philosophy. Contains essays by Jack Stillinger, M. H. Abrams, Walter J. Bate, Aileen Ward, Ronald Sharp, Eavan Boland, Susan Wolfson, Donald H. Reiman, Elizabeth Jones, Debbie Lee, Terence Hoagwood, Hermione de Almeida, David Bromwich, George Steiner, and Philip Levine.

Wolfson, Susan J., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Keats . Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

DOI: 10.1017/CCOL0521651263

One of the best collections of essays on Keats, to date, with a focus on poetic form, gender, history, and politics. The volume is available online to those students whose institutions subscribe to the Cambridge Online series. Contains essays by John Kandl, Karen Swann, Duncan Wu, Jeffrey N. Cox, Vincent Newey, Paul D. Sheats, Susan J. Wolfson, John Barnard, Garrett Stewart, Christopher Ricks, Theresa M. Kelley, Greg Kucich, William C. Keach, Anne K. Mellor, Alan Richardson, and Jack Stillinger.

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The Poetry Issue

A Poet’s Poet: The Astonishing Career of John Keats

Robert Pinsky reviews Lucasta Miller’s “Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph.”

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KEATS A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph By Lucasta Miller

Early in her book about John Keats, Lucasta Miller calls Lord Byron an “aristocratic megastar.” That funny epithet is accurate for Byron’s more-than-superstar celebrity in his day. It also suggests the many ways Byron was the opposite of Keats. Miller quotes Byron, in a letter, referring to the younger and much less well-known poet as “Jack Keats or Ketch or whatever his names are.”

Posterity, as Miller says, has since then “leveled … up” the two poets. And “leveled” is an understatement. For a certain lyrical essence of poetry written in English, Keats in his greatest poems surpasses every writer since Shakespeare. For poets, he embodies something central to the art, a little like what Shakespeare embodied for Keats. That lyrical core survives the tangle of mythology that exaggerates his actual life.

Well beyond the contrast with Byron, the words “aristocratic” and “megastar” are germane to Miller’s job of refreshing and clarifying an old story. Social class and fame were both powerful, daily presences for Keats. They still infuse the shifty cloud of half-truths, myths, stereotypes, facts and genuine marvels that surround his astonishing career.

Directly, or through the river of generations, from close up or far away, against the current or with it or across it, poetry written in English is fed by the imagination and music of John Keats: his sensuous, conflicted images, his memorizable cadenzas of consonant and vowel. Modernists like Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams often seem in a combat-dance with lines and poems by Keats. His letters amplify and complicate the enduring, tidal force of his imagination.

One’s dislike for Byron’s snark shouldn’t encourage the clichés about Keats as a frail victim that Miller wisely, cheerfully corrects. The myths are so familiar that the debunking itself can become a cliché. Famously, it was tuberculosis that killed Keats, not mean book reviews or the phrase “cockney poetry.” The matter of his social class is more complicated, and more interesting, than the mere contrast with an aristocratic megastar.

An example of the mythology: William Butler Yeats, for effect, called Keats “the coarse-bred son of a livery stable keeper” who produced “luxuriant song.” Responding to Yeats, Miller acknowledges that the poet’s father, Thomas Keats, was a stable worker — but he married the boss’s daughter, Frances Jennings, whose parents owned the quite successful Swan and Hoop Livery Stables, with a profitable taproom business on the premises. Miller describes Keats as “a lower-middle-class democrat” and, in a telling phrase, “an amorphous outsider.” He did have terrible money problems, but those problems involved the small income based on his grandparents’ legacy.

In other words, the great poet came from the mixed, fluent, impure, category-defying kind of social background that remains a source of art. By structuring “Keats” around nine specific poems (and an epitaph), and allowing herself a recurring, candid first person, Miller evokes the shifting, various genius of her subject without dumbing-down, while avoiding the conventions of academic biography. Keats, as she says, “is never a fixed entity. He’s always in motion.”

It is a pleasure to have the full text of a poem at the beginning of each chapter, followed by a personal essay combining Keats’s story with the author’s sensible, attentive understanding of each poem, in itself and as part of the poet’s life story. The structure, with Miller’s occasional reminiscences of growing up near Keats’s Hampstead and other North London neighborhoods, builds toward the great odes and the concluding, subtly ambiguous epitaph: “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.”

“Writ in Water” is ambiguous because fate cannot be known. Even the archaic “writ” suggests endurance in time. Keats had to at least suspect, or fantasize, that his name might after his death be written in print millions of times, as it has been, and spoken reverently many millions of times more. On the other hand, he knew that he and his work would likely be soon forgotten — he was not insane. But since his teens he had thought, spoken and written about joining the immortal poets. He knew that just possibly, for us in the future, there would be tremendous meaning in the words “John Keats.” Unknown or the opposite: The epitaph with its “writ in Water” works either way as a magnificently shrewd piece of writing. The nine words work well in anticipation of both opposite, possible realities.

That mastery of opposites and contradictions is reflected at another level in “Ode to a Nightingale,” with “a drowsy numbness pains/My sense,” and the “still unravished bride” of “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” The doubleness of mind, or oppositional streak, also makes sense in a poet who liked fistfights. At school he was “more pugilistic than intellectual,” Miller writes.

In one of her best first-person passages, Miller — the author of “The Brontë Myth” and “L.E.L.” — remembers from her school days two English teachers who both taught Keats. There was an older, paternal, “somewhat authoritarian” nature lover who took the class outside, where they sat on the grass, under the trees, to hear him read “To Autumn” aloud. In contrast, the younger, unstable teacher said aloud to the same students, in a mocking, sarcastic deadpan, out of context, the much debated, ridiculed and defended Keatsian words “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”

Keats once wrote in a letter: “I have no trust whatever on Poetry. … The marvel is to me how people read so much of it.”

Keats of course would have the empathic negative capability to embrace and see past both the didactic nature lover and the ironic, debunking rationalist. A fighter with a genius for friendship, a joker and a lover of wine, he wrote in a letter Miller cites: “I have no trust whatever on Poetry. … The marvel is to me how people read so much of it.” The “marvel” and the implied tormented laughter will be recognized not only by poets but by anyone who has had a lover’s quarrel with their calling.

His calling demanded hard work. Miller gives readers the impressive list of poems Keats wrote in the year 1819 — dozens of them, across a range of genres and subjects. At the heart of it all is his remarkable, unique ear for the melodies of sentence-shape and the expressive harmonic structure of consonants. A neighbor recalls of the pre-school-age Keats that “when he could just speak, instead of answering questions put to him, he would always make a rhyme to the last word people said, and then laugh.”

That turn of mind underlies the symphonic blather of “Endymion,” which evolved into the precision and richness of “Ode to a Nightingale” and “To Autumn.” The painter Benjamin Robert Haydon’s account of Keats reciting his “Hymn to Pan,” at Haydon’s request, to William Wordsworth, resembles the child’s pleasure in the sound of rhyme: “I asked Keats to repeat it — which he did in the usual half-chant, (most touching) walking up and down the room.” The “usual half-chant” is a striking detail, in its way more interesting, certainly more tantalizing, than Wordsworth’s variously reported response of approval or condescension.

Keats’s letters are a central reality for poets and readers. In a minor key, Miller includes a note from the poet to his publisher, the loyal and generous John Taylor. Knowing he will die quite soon, the young poet writes, “In case of my death this scrap of Paper may be serviceable in your possession.” As Miller says, “This is Keats in his own voice”:

“All my estate real and personal consists in the hopes of the sale of books publish’d or unpublish’d. Now I wish Brown and you to be the first paid Creditors — the rest is in nubibus [in the clouds], but in case it should shower pay my Taylor the few pounds I owe him.

“My chest of books I divide among my friends.”

Miller is at her personal, plain best in commenting on this will: “notable for its casualness and brevity, its nature metaphor of clouds and rain, its conversational use of a Latinism, and its wide-open embrace of ‘friends,’ with no thought to name them.” She notes that in the affectionate phrase “pay my Taylor” the name becomes “almost a pun.” Her commentary cannot replace, but does counterbalance, learned, impassioned debates about the ideas in Keats’s great letters. In this passage, she helps a reader perceive the actual, living, 25-year-old man.

Years ago, a literary publication asked a variety of writers to name a dead author they would like to speak with, and why. The only author named twice was Keats. The two writers who named him, a novelist from Britain and a poet from New Jersey, gave the one same reason for wanting to converse with Keats — to tell him how celebrated his work had become: in effect, that his name, far from being writ in water, was revered.

Lucasta Miller’s brief, conversational (at moments chatty) book, with its organization based on the poet’s writing, making the poems the starting point, might be a fitting document, among many thousands, for that imaginary communication between John Keats and us, his future readers.

KEATS: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph By Lucasta Miller Illustrated. 353 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $32.50.

Robert Pinsky’s autobiography, “Jersey Breaks: Becoming an American Poet,” will be published this fall.

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A Literary Life

• © 2010
• R. S. White

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Part of the book series: Literary Lives (LL)

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Table of contents (13 chapters)

Front matter, ‘he could not quiet be’, ‘aesculapius’, ‘was there a poet born’, ‘fraternal souls’ and poems (1817), ‘that which is creative must create itself’: 1817 and endymion, ‘dark passages’: 1818, january to june, walking north and the death of tom: 1818, july to december, ‘a gordian complication of feelings’: love, women and romance, ‘tease us out of thought’: may 1819, odes, autumn in winchester, poems (1820), the final journey, back matter.

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"A great strength of this impressive biography is the way it accompanies Keats's life narrative with critical and interpretative passages on the poetry - there is much in these pages that will provoke thought for students and more experienced Keatsians. Keats's childhood, school years and medical career are exceptionally well done, and among many highlights the account of Keats's plays, letters, and Endymion are especially rewarding." Professor Nicholas Roe, University of St. Andrews, UK

"...makes significant contributions at the most advanced level of research and, at the other end of the scale, would be an excellent introduction for college undergraduates and general readers... a fine piece of research and writing..." Jack Stillinger, New Books Online

"...White's John Keats: A Literary Life allows us to see Keats as an active/creative agent, forging an identity between the competing demands of the actual and the imagined. This places Keats firmly within his own time, but it also brings his life into fascinating dialogue with the present. The book, a most welcome addition to the literature on John Keats, is certain to draw a wide and appreciative audience." Peter Otto, Australian Book Review

"R.S. White has written a focused, concise and perceptive biography of John Keats for Palgrave Macmillan's Literary Lives, which will stand readers of the poetry in good stead for years to come As a Renaissance scholar, White brings a thorough understanding of other literary periods to bear on the Romantics, and as a result offers some original commentary demonstrating the influence on Keats of Edmund Spenser, John Donne and, above all, William Shakespeare. He is also sensitive to the sense in which Keats regarded his second profession, poetry, as a continuation of his first - that of medicine. Both were concerned with the healing of mind and body, and that goes some way towards explaining Keats' change of career". Duncan Wu, Times Higher Education

"Elegantly written and expertly crafted, R. S. White's John Keats: A Literary Life aims to redress just this kind of imbalance between biography and critical commentary, not only managing to synthesise the most innovative current criticism on Keats's life and work in less than 300 pages, but also establishing a fresh set of contexts with which to read them Indeed, it is the insightful commentary that White repeatedly brings to apparently well-established events, ideas, and contexts that makes this book so valuable Academic readers will be glad that White has chosen to incorporate so much new material into his concise Life, but this is nonetheless one of those rare books that will appeal to both the general and the specialist reader: students requiring either a short biography of Keats or a critical overview of his major works will still find this book an invaluable starting point for further study. Considering the amount of material already published on Keats, it is a major achievement that White's Life is both accessible to students and an essential addition to our knowledge of Keats's life and work." Porscha Fermanis, British Association for Romantic Studies

"Students and scholars alike will find that White's discussion of contextual material about the Hunt circle and Keats's medical training, along with the author's extensive knowledge of Shakespeare's works, will enrich their understanding of specific passages in both letters and poems." Grant F. Scott, The Keats-Shelley Review

"This is a helpful, insightful, elegantly written account of the poet and his poetry ... A very fine addition to Palgrave Macmillan's Literary Lives series. White pays serious attention to the complexities of Keats's verse, but he writes clearly and with a lively delight worthy of his subject. The book would provide an ideal introduction to the poet for any undergraduate student, but it also offers significant and original interpretations of his work." The Year's Review in English Studies

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Bibliographic information.

Book Title : John Keats

Book Subtitle : A Literary Life

Authors : R. S. White

Series Title : Literary Lives

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230281448

Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan London

eBook Packages : Palgrave Literature Collection , Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

Copyright Information : Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2010

Hardcover ISBN : 978-0-230-57263-8 Published: 26 May 2010

Softcover ISBN : 978-1-137-03047-4 Published: 26 May 2010

eBook ISBN : 978-0-230-28144-8 Published: 26 May 2010

Series ISSN : 2946-2037

Series E-ISSN : 2946-2045

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : X, 260

Topics : Poetry and Poetics , British and Irish Literature , Nineteenth-Century Literature , Eighteenth-Century Literature

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John Keats Biography and Work

Table of Contents

John Keats (1795-1821) was an English Romantic poet whose work continues to be celebrated for its beauty, emotion, and lyrical style. Born in London, Keats was the son of a stable keeper and received a limited education before training as a surgeon. However, he ultimately abandoned his medical career to pursue poetry full-time.

Early Work and Career

John Keats Biography and Work:- Keats’s first published work was a collection of poems entitled “Poems” (1817), which he wrote alongside his friends Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Wordsworth. Although the collection was not initially well-received, it did contain several poems that have since become beloved classics, including “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” “Sleep and Poetry,” and “The Eve of St. Agnes.”

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Keats’s next collection, “Endymion” (1818), was met with mixed reviews and criticism, which deeply affected the young poet. Despite the negative response, Keats continued to write and publish poetry, and his next collection, “Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems” (1820), was better received. The collection includes several of Keats’s most famous works, including “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and “To Autumn.”

Illness and Death

John Keats Biography and Work:- Sadly, Keats’s career was cut short by illness. He was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1820, and the disease would ultimately claim his life just a few years later. Despite his failing health, Keats continued to write, and his final poems, including “The Fall of Hyperion” and “To Autumn,” are considered some of his most masterful and poignant works.

Keats died in Rome in February of 1821 at the age of 25, and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery there. His reputation as one of the greatest poets of the Romantic era has only grown since his death, and his work continues to inspire and captivate readers to this day.

John Keats Biography and Work:- John Keats’s legacy continues to be felt today, more than two centuries after his birth. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest poets in the English language, and his works are studied and celebrated by scholars, students, and poetry lovers around the world.

Keats’s poetry continues to inspire and influence generations of writers, artists, and musicians. His use of vivid imagery, his exploration of the themes of love, mortality, and the power of the imagination, and his lyrical and emotional style have left an indelible mark on the literary world.

John Keats Biography and Work:- Keats’s work has also had a profound impact on the wider culture. His ideas about the importance of the individual, the power of the imagination, and the connection between art and the spiritual world have resonated with readers and thinkers across the centuries.

In addition, Keats’s life and work have been the subject of countless books, films, and other works of art. His tragic death at the young age of 25 has only added to his mythic status, and his story continues to capture the imaginations of people around the world.

Overall, John Keats’s legacy is one of profound beauty, emotional depth, and lasting relevance to the human experience. His works remain a testament to the power of art to inspire, transform, and transcend the limitations of the individual self.

Themes and Style

John Keats Biography and Work:- Keats’s poetry is characterized by its emphasis on beauty, love, and the power of the imagination. He often used vivid and sensuous descriptions of nature, which he saw as a source of spiritual and artistic inspiration. Keats was interested in exploring the idea of beauty as a form of truth and transcendence, and many of his poems celebrate the transformative power of art and the imagination.

One of the central themes in Keats’s work is the idea of mortality and the transience of life. He was acutely aware of the brevity of human existence, and many of his poems explore the idea of death as a natural and inevitable part of the cycle of life. However, Keats also believed in the possibility of transcendence, and many of his poems suggest that the beauty and power of art can provide a kind of immortality.

Another key theme in Keats’s work is the idea of love as a transformative force. He was deeply interested in the power of love to inspire and elevate the human spirit, and many of his poems explore the idea of love as a kind of spiritual and emotional journey. Keats believed that love could help to transcend the limitations of the individual self, and many of his poems celebrate the transformative power of love as a form of communion with the divine.

John Keats Biography and Work:- Stylistically, Keats’s poetry is characterized by its lyricism, emotional intensity, and vivid imagery. He used rich and sensuous language to create a kind of musicality in his poetry, and many of his poems are marked by their emotional depth and intense emotional resonance. Keats also made use of classical and mythological imagery, which he saw as a way to connect his work to the timeless traditions of Western literature and culture.

Overall, Keats’s themes and style reflect his deep interest in the transformative power of art and the imagination, as well as his belief in the possibility of transcendence and spiritual elevation. His work continues to be celebrated for its beauty, emotional depth, and lasting relevance to the human experience.

Famous English Romantic poet John Keats made his influence on literature by writing poetry that was delicate, lyrical, and intensely emotional. His works are still studied and admired for their beauty, the depth to which they probe issues like love, beauty, mortality, and the power of the imagination, and the profundity to which they illuminate the human condition. Keats’ life was tragically cut short, but his poetry, which has influenced many readers and authors all across the world, continues to carry on his legacy.

Q. What was John Keats famous for?

Ans. John Keats was famous for his poetry, which is characterized by its lyrical and emotional intensity, its emphasis on beauty and the power of the imagination, and its exploration of themes such as love, mortality, and the transcendent power of art.

Q. When was John Keats born and when did he die?

Ans. John Keats was born on October 31, 1795, in London, England. He died on February 23, 1821, at the age of 25, in Rome, Italy.

Q. What is John Keats’s most famous poem?

Ans. John Keats’s most famous poem is probably “Ode to a Nightingale,” which is considered one of the greatest poems in the English language. Other notable works include “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “To Autumn,” and “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.”

Q. What is the significance of John Keats’s “negative capability”?

Ans. “Negative capability” is a term coined by John Keats to describe the ability to embrace uncertainty, mystery, and the unknown. It is a key aspect of Keats’s approach to poetry, which values the imagination and emotional intuition over reason and logic.

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