John Keats (1795 - 1821) was an English poet of the second generation of Romantics, whose reputation rests on work written in a period of barely four years. [1] Trained and licensed in medicine before turning entirely to poetry, he produced in 1819 the sequence of odes that are among the most studied poems in English. He died of tuberculosis in Rome at the age of twenty-five. [2]
Early life and medical training
Keats was born on 31 October 1795 in Moorgate, London, the eldest of four surviving children of the manager of a livery stable. [1] His father died in a riding accident when Keats was eight and his mother of tuberculosis when he was fourteen, leaving the children to guardians. He was educated at John Clarke's school in Enfield, where a master's son introduced him to Spenser and to Renaissance poetry.
In 1811 he was apprenticed to a surgeon-apothecary, and in 1815 he entered Guy's Hospital in Southwark as a student, an institution whose medical school later became part of King's College London. [1] He qualified as an apothecary in 1816, but by then he had determined to write, and gave up medicine the following year against the advice of his guardian.
First publications
His sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" appeared in 1816, and a first collection, Poems, in 1817. [2] The long allegorical romance Endymion followed in 1818 and was savaged in the Tory quarterlies, partly because of Keats's association with the radical writer Leigh Hunt and his modest social origins.
In the summer of 1818 he walked through the Lake District and Scotland, returning to nurse his brother Tom, who died of tuberculosis in December. [1] Shortly afterwards he met Fanny Brawne, to whom he became engaged; their attachment, recorded in his letters, could not be consummated in marriage because he lacked means.
The great year
Between roughly January and September 1819 Keats wrote the bulk of the work on which his reputation rests: The Eve of St. Agnes, La Belle Dame sans Merci, the unfinished Hyperion and its revision The Fall of Hyperion, Lamia, and the odes to Psyche, to a Nightingale, on a Grecian Urn, on Melancholy, on Indolence, and finally To Autumn. [2] These appeared in the 1820 volume Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems, which was received far more favourably than his earlier work.
His letters from this period, written to family and friends, are regarded as among the finest in English and contain his formulations of "negative capability" and of the poet's lack of fixed identity. [3]
Illness and death
Keats showed the first clear symptoms of tuberculosis in February 1820, recognising the arterial blood himself with a physician's eye. [1] On medical advice he sailed for Italy in September with the painter Joseph Severn, settling in lodgings beside the Spanish Steps in Rome. He died there on 23 February 1821 and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery under a stone bearing, at his own instruction, no name, only the words "Here lies one whose name was writ in water". [2]
Legacy
Keats was little regarded at his death but was championed by the Victorians, notably Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites, and by the twentieth century was firmly established alongside Wordsworth and Coleridge in the English canon. [4] His odes are among the most anthologised poems in the language, and his letters are studied as a body of criticism in their own right. His Rome lodging is preserved as the Keats-Shelley House.
