write the biography of john keats

Poems & Poets

John Keats was born in London on 31 October 1795, the eldest of Thomas and Frances Jennings Keats’s four children. Although he died at the age of twenty-five, Keats had perhaps the most remarkable career of any English poet. He published only fifty-four poems, in three slim volumes and a few magazines. But over his short development he took on the challenges of a wide range of poetic forms from the sonnet, to the Spenserian romance, to the Miltonic epic, defining anew their possibilities with his own distinctive fusion of earnest energy, control of conflicting perspectives and forces, poetic self-consciousness, and, occasionally, dry ironic wit.

Although he is now seen as part of the British Romantic literary tradition, in his own lifetime Keats would not have been associated with other major Romantic poets, and he himself was often uneasy among them. Outside his friend Leigh Hunt 's circle of liberal intellectuals, the generally conservative reviewers of the day attacked his work as mawkish and bad-mannered, as the work of an upstart “vulgar Cockney poetaster” (John Gibson Lockhart), and as consisting of “the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language” (John Wilson Croker). Although Keats had a liberal education in the boy’s academy at Enfield and trained at Guy’s Hospital to become a surgeon, he had no formal literary education. Yet Keats today is seen as one of the canniest readers, interpreters, questioners, of the “modern” poetic project-which he saw as beginning with William Wordsworth —to create poetry in a world devoid of mythic grandeur, poetry that sought its wonder in the desires and sufferings of the human heart. Beyond his precise sense of the difficulties presented him in his own literary-historical moment, he developed with unparalleled rapidity, in a relative handful of extraordinary poems, a rich, powerful, and exactly controlled poetic style that ranks Keats, with the William Shakespeare of the sonnets, as one of the greatest lyric poets in English.

Keats was said to have been born in his maternal grandfather’s stable, the Swan and Hoop, near what is now Finsbury Circus, but there is no real evidence for this birthplace, or for the belief that his family was particularly poor. Thomas Keats managed the stable for his father-in-law and later owned it, providing the family an income comfortable enough for them to buy a home and send the older children, John and George (1797-1841), to the small village academy of Enfield, run by the liberal and gifted teacher John Clarke. Young Tom Keats (1799-1818) soon followed them. Although little is known of Keats’s early home life, it appears to have been happy, the family close-knit, the environment full of the exuberance and clamor of a big-city stable and inn yard. Frances Keats was devoted to her children, particularly her favorite, John, who returned that devotion intensely. Under Keats’s father the family business prospered, so that he hoped to send his son, John, to Harrow.

At the age of eight Keats entered Enfield Academy and became friends with young Charles Cowden Clarke, the fifteen-year-old son of the headmaster. He was not a shy, bookish child; Clarke remembered an outgoing youth, who made friends easily and fought passionately in their defense: “He was not merely the ‘favorite of all,’ like a pet prize-fighter, for his terrier courage; but his high-mindedness, his utter unconsciousness of a mean motive, his placability, his generosity, wrought so general a feeling in his behalf, that I never heard a word of disapproval from any one, superior or equal, who had known him.” On the night of 15 April 1804, when Keats had been in school less than a year, an accident occurred that would alter his life and proved to be the first in a series of losses and dislocations that would pursue him throughout his brief life. His father was seriously injured when his horse stumbled as he rode home, and he died the next day. The shock to the family was great, emotionally and financially. Within two months of her husband’s death, Frances Keats had moved the children to her mother’s home and remarried; but the marriage soon proved disastrous, and it appears that, after losing the stables and some of her inheritance to her estranged husband, William Rawlings, the poet’s mother left the family, perhaps to live with another man. She had returned by 1808, however, broken and ill; she died of tuberculosis (as had her brother just a few months before) in March 1809. John became the oldest male in his family, and, to the end of his life, felt a fiercely protective loyalty to his brothers and sister, Fanny Keats. His most thoughtful and moving letters on poetry’s relation to individual experience, to human suffering and spiritual development, were written to his brothers. At school, Keats drew closer to the headmaster, John Clarke, and his son, Cowden. He became, in fact, one of Clarke’s favorite pupils, reading voraciously and taking first prizes in essay contests his last two or three terms. In some part this new academic interest was a response to his loneliness after his mother’s death. But he had by then already won an essay contest and begun translating Latin and French. Keats’s love for literature, and his association of the life of imagination with the politics of a liberal intelligentsia, really began in Clarke’s school. It was modeled on the Dissenting academies that encouraged a broad range of reading in classical and modern languages, as well as history and modern science; discipline was light, and students were encouraged to pursue their own interests by a system of rewards and prizes. Clarke himself was a friend of the radical reformers John Cartwright and Joseph Priestley and subscribed to Leigh Hunt’s Examiner , which Cowden Clarke said, “no doubt laid the foundation of [Keats’s] love of civil and religious liberty.” Keats’s sense of the power and romance of literature began as the Clarkes encouraged him to turn his energy and curiosity to their library. Cowden Clarke recalled his reading histories, novels, travel stories; but the books “that were his constantly recurrent sources of attraction were Tooke’s ‘Pantheon,’ Lamprière’s ‘Classical Dictionary,’ which he appeared to learn , and Spence’s ‘Polymetis.’ This was the store whence he acquired his intimacy with the Greek mythology.” On his own, Keats translated most of the Aeneid and continued learning French. Literature for him was more than a dreamy refuge for a lonely orphan: it was a domain for energetic exploration, “realms of gold,” as he later wrote, tempting not only as a realm of idealistic romance but also of a beauty that enlarges our imaginative sympathies. All through his life his friends remarked on his industry and his generosity: literature for Keats was a career to be struggled with, fought for, and earned, for the sake of what the poet’s struggle could offer humankind in insight and beauty. This impression recurs often in accounts of Keats, this pugnacity of one who fought his way into literary circles, and this compassion for others that justifies the literary career. Of course, at this point, when Keats was only fifteen or sixteen, a literary career was not a serious thought. In 1810 Alice Whalley Jennings, Keats’s grandmother, was seventy-five, and in charge of the four orphaned children, John, George (then thirteen), Tom (eleven), and Fanny (seven). She had inherited a considerable sum from her husband, John Jennings (who died in 1805), and in order to ensure the children’s financial future turned to Richard Abbey, a tea merchant who, on the advice of her attorney, she appointed to act as trustee. Most of Keats’s later financial misery can be traced to this decision. If Abbey was no villain, he was nevertheless narrow-minded and conventional, and, where money was concerned, tight-fisted and often deceitful. He dispensed the children’s money grudgingly and often lied or freely interpreted the terms of the bequest: it was not until 1833, years after Fanny Keats came of age, that she finally forced a legal settlement. It has been estimated that by the time of Keats’s death in 1821 either Abbey had withheld from him, or Keats had failed to discover, about £2,000, a considerable inheritance (in those days £50 per year was at least a living wage, and £100-200 would provide a comfortable existence). Keats left Enfield in 1811, and, perhaps at Abbey’s urging—though Clarke remembered it as Keats’s choice—he began to study for a career as a surgeon. He was apprenticed to a respected surgeon, Thomas Hammond, in a small town near Enfield, Edmonton, where his grandmother lived. We know little of Keats’s life during these years 1811-1814, other than that Keats assisted Hammond and began the study of anatomy and physiology. Surgery would have been a respectable and reasonable profession for one of Keats’s means: unlike the profession of medicine, the job of surgeon in Keats’s day did not require a university degree. A surgeon, licensed by examination, was a general practitioner, setting bones, dressing wounds, giving vaccinations. Keats always maintained he was “ambitious of doing the world some good.” It is likely that he began his career with enthusiasm, but living in the small rooms over the surgery, Keats grew restless and lonely; he began to wander the woods and walk the four miles to Enfield to see the Clarkes. He completed his translation of the Aeneid , and, according to Cowden Clarke, he “devoured rather than read” books he borrowed: Ovid’s Metamorphosis , John Milton ‘s Paradise Lost , Virgil’s Eclogues , and dozens of others. But the book that decisively awakened his love of poetry, indeed shocked him suddenly into self-awareness of his own powers of imagination, was Edmund Spenser ‘s Faerie Queene . This was a turning point. Certainly this close teacher-pupil friendship with Cowden Clarke, these evenings at the headmaster’s table, and the long late-night rambles discussing books borrowed from the library, were crucial in making John Keats a poet. His friend Charles Brown believed Keats first read Spenser when he was eighteen, in 1813 or 1814: “From his earliest boyhood he had an acute sense of beauty, whether in a flower, a tree, the sky, or the animal world; how was it that his sense of beauty did not naturally seek in his mind for images by which he could best express his feelings? It was the ‘Fairy Queen’ that awakened his genius. In Spenser’s fairy land he was enchanted, breathed in a new world, and became another being.” Soon, wrote Brown, he “was entirely absorbed in poetry.” (Brown subsequently struck out the word entirely .) Clarke recalled Keats’s exuberant joy, “he ramped through the scenes of that… purely poetical romance, like a young horse into a Spring meadow.” Some time in 1814 Keats wrote his first poem, “In Imitation of Spenser.” What is remarkable about this first poem is its vitality, its appropriation of the Spenserian rhyme scheme and richly compressed imagery to evoke a romantically voluptuous dream world. It is a youthful piece. But the poetic ear is acute, the natural description delights in itself, and the verse dares with naive persistence to draw attention to the power of poetic image to set a dreamy scene (“Ah! could I tell the wonders of an isle / That in that fairest lake had been / I could e’en Dido of her grief beguile.” And of course he does attempt to tell). But there was more than “pure poetry” involved in Keats’s turn, over the next year or two, to poetry as a vocation. Politics played a role as well—in fact, a decisive one. As early as 1812 Cowden Clarke had met the radical publisher of The Examiner , Leigh Hunt; in 1814 he was a regular visitor to Hunt’s prison cell (he had been imprisoned in 1813 for libeling the Prince Regent), and Keats must have been enthralled by another kind of romance than Spenser’s—the romance of the London circle of artists and intellectuals who supported progressive causes and democratic reform, and opposed the aristocratic counterrevolution then waging war on Napoleon. Indeed, in these liberal circles of the Regency bourgeoisie, Keats might even hope to attract attention, even as an outsider, on the strength of his political enthusiasm and poetic talent. His next poems are political: in April 1814 the kings of Europe had defeated Napoleon, but amid the general optimism in England, liberals, including Keats in “On Peace,” called on the victors to support reform. The sonnet, his first, is clumsy and shrill. But it does show how Keats meant to get attention. In February 1815, Hunt was released, and Keats offered a sonnet, “Written on the Day That Mr. Leigh Hunt Left Prison,” through Cowden Clarke, whom he stopped on his way to meet Hunt: “when taking leave, he gave me the sonnet,” said Clarke, “... how clearly do I recall the conscious look and hesitation with which he offered it!” The publication of this sonnet in the Poems of 1817 would have been noted by the conservative reviewers who would later attack him as an associate of Hunt’s. To take a political stand so early in his career was a bold act: in those turbulent times political passions ran deep. It may have been over political matters that Keats quarreled with Dr. Hammond. We know that he did and that for some reason he left his apprenticeship early. On 1 October 1815, Keats moved to London and registered at Guy’s Hospital for a six-month course of study required for him to become a licensed surgeon and apothecary. This move to the dreary neighborhood of the Borough, just south of London Bridge, was exciting for Keats. He could be near his family now: his grandmother had died in December 1814, and George and Tom moved to Abbey’s countinghouse where they were apprenticed (Fanny went to live with the Abbeys at Walthamstow). Before the move, Keats in 1815 seems to have been moody and at times deeply depressed. In the February 1815 poem “To Hope” he speaks of “hateful thoughts [that] enwrap my soul in gloom,” and “sad Despondency.” This was perhaps only a fashionable literary pose—he had recently written a sonnet in praise of Byron’s “sweetly sad” melody—and it takes a political turn, looking to “Hope” as a principle of social liberation. But his brother recalled this time as one of brooding uncertainty, his grandmother’s death no doubt having increased his anxiety to bring some stability to what remained of a family so shaken by death and dislocation. More pressing, perhaps, was his growing eagerness, in the exciting political climate of Napoleon’s brief return from March until the Battle of Waterloo in June, to make some contribution as a poet to the liberal cause. He was fully committed to a career as a surgeon but was still determined to find time to write verse. His brother George, to ease John’s troubled moods, introduced him to his friends Caroline and Anne Mathew and their cousin, would-be poet, George Felton Mathew. Keats’s friendship with Mathew was brief but stimulating. With the two sisters Keats maintained a conventional literary friendship, addressing to them some stilted anapests (“To Some Ladies,” “On Receiving a Curious Shell ...,” “O Come, dearest Emma!”) in the style of the popular Regency poet Thomas Moore . The friendship with George Mathew, though, buoyed his spirits and encouraged him in his poetic purpose. Here at last was a poet, who—initially at least—seemed to share his literary tastes and encouraged his verse writing. If his brother remembered Keats’s emotional distress, Mathew, writing to Keats’s biographer Richard Monckton Milnes more than thirty years later, remembered that Keats “enjoyed good health—a fine flow of animal spirits—was fond of company—could amuse himself admirably with the frivolities of life—and had great confidence in himself.” Mathew was reserved, rather conservative, and earnestly religious; the friendship soon cooled. But in November 1815 Keats addressed to him his longest poem yet, “To George Felton Mathew,” in heroic couplets modeled on the Elizabethan verse epistle. Despite the stiffness of the verse, the style, colloquial yet descriptively lush, is becoming recognizably Keats’s own though clearly developed from his reading of Hunt and Wordsworth; and, most interestingly, the themes would become characteristic, though here they are only suggested: that poets associate in a “brotherhood” of the “genius—loving heart”; that they represent, as much as political figures, fighters for “the cause of freedom”; and that poets bring “healing” to a suffering world, often hostile to their genius, by evoking a world of escape and timeless myth. Few English authors have ever, in fact, had as much direct observation and experience of suffering as John Keats. Until the early summer of 1816 he studied medicine at Guy’s Hospital, and he did so well he was promoted to “dresser” unusually quickly. His duties involved dressing wounds daily to prevent or minimize infection, setting bones, and assisting with surgery. He took to the work well, lodging with two older students at 28 St. Thomas Street, attending lectures by the foremost surgeon of the day, Astley Cooper, as well as courses in anatomy and physiology, botany, chemistry, and medical practice. Yet by the spring of 1816 he was clearly becoming restless, even defensive, about poetry. He was increasingly excited by the new modern poetry of Wordsworth (whose 1815 Poems Keats had obtained just as he entered Guy’s), its naturalism and direct appeal to the secular imagination so different from Spenser’s romance. And, once again, there was the influence of Hunt, whose homey poetic diction with its colloquial informality, seemed daring to the twenty-year-old Keats, who would have associated Hunt’s 1816 poems in The Examiner with a politically antiauthoritarian movement of which modern poetry was a part. He began to speak about poetry, and little else, to his fellow students, with a kind of insecure arrogance. “Medical knowledge was beneath his attention,” said his fellow student and roommate, Henry Stephens, “no—Poetry was to his mind the zenith of all his Aspirations—The only thing worthy the attention of superior minds.... The greatest men in the world were the Poets, and to rank among them was the chief object of his ambition.... This feeling was accompanied with a good deal of Pride and some conceit; and that amongst mere Medical students, he would walk & talk as one of the Gods might be supposed to do, when mingling with mortals.” We need not, perhaps, take this memory too seriously, but clearly Keats wanted to think of himself as a man of literature. Flushed with enthusiasm for Hunt’s poetry, he sent to The Examiner in March a sonnet that he had written the previous autumn, “Solitude.” It was published 5 May 1816. Stephens recalled, “he was exceedingly gratified.” However lofty his conception of the poet in 1816, Keats chose an unfortunate model in Leigh Hunt. The typical Hunt idiom was a highly mannered luxuriance, characterized by an abundance of - y and - ly modifiers, adjectives made from nouns and verbs (“bosomy,” “scattery,” “tremblingly”), as well as a jaunty colloquialism. Surely we can hear this Huntian influence in the little verses Keats scribbled on the cover of Stephens’s lecture notebook: “Give me women, wine and snuff, / Until I cry out ‘hold, enough!’”; or in some verses he began in the style of Hunt’s Story of Rimini (1815), “Specimen of an Induction to a Poem”: “Lo! I must tell a tale of chivalry; / For while I muse, the lance points slantingly / Athwart the morning air: some lady sweet ... Hails it with tears.” The reader notes in this poem the frequent enjambment for which Hunt himself had argued, against the masculine (strong-syllable) rhymed, end-stopped couplets of Alexander Pope ; Hunt also disliked median caesurae, arguing for the fluidity of lines that paused later, after “weak” syllables. This argument (however arcane it may appear now) had political resonance for Hunt, since it promised to break the “aristocratic” sound of the heroic couplet so pleasing to conservative tastemakers. (Lord Byron, who objected to Hunt’s theories, never completely forgave Keats for his attack on Pope in “Sleep and Poetry.”) But if these elements in Hunt’s poetry seemed declassé to his and Keats’s critics, today one cannot say that Hunt’s influence on Keats was in any simple sense bad. For one thing Hunt was not Keats’s only model. Spenser was a more serious and enduring influence, as were Browne, Drayton, Milton, Wordsworth, and later, Shakespeare. Most twenty-year-old poets need a model of some sort, and there were certainly more banal models in his day from which to choose. On the other hand (as Walter Jackson Bate suggests), to attempt to have written like a greater and more popular poet, like Byron, would not have had the energizing effect on Keats’s verse that Hunt had. Hunt enabled Keats to write and, eventually, to surpass him. For a young middle-class liberal with no university training, a healthy dislike of Pope and an enthusiasm for Hunt and Wordsworth provided an enabling sense of identity. Finally, Keats was by no means, even in 1815-1816, a slavish imitator. His works have a troubled sense of self-consciousness completely absent from Hunt’s. Keats’s are also poems of escape to nature, and in these tropes we can sense as much Keats’s very shrewd (and early) understanding of Wordsworth’s poetic project as of Hunt’s. In poems such as the fine sonnet “How many bards gild the lapses of time!” or the “Ode to Apollo,” or the lovely (summer 1816) sonnet “Oh! how I love, on a fair summer’s eve,” one finds an important Keatsian trope: the poem about the poet’s own sense of himself as a modern, preparing to write from his experience a new poetry to match that of England’s great writers. On 25 July 1816 Keats took, and passed, the examinations that allowed him to practice surgery, and left London for the fashionable seaside resort of Margate. It had been a trying year (and a difficult exam: Stephens flunked), and Keats needed to escape the hot, dirty streets of the Borough to collect his thoughts. Here, for the first time really, he confronted, in a long poem of generally self-assured verse, his own struggle to become a poet, in the Epistle to My Brother George , inspired by verse epistles Hunt published in The Examiner but interesting in its own right. For here Keats explored what it would mean to him “to strive to think divinely,” to have a poet’s imaginative vision while absorbing the sights and sounds of nature in a kind of Wordsworthian “wise passiveness.” As so often in Romantic poetry, a poet’s complaint at being unable to have a vision itself becomes a vision of what he might see if he were a true poet. After fifty lines or so of such inspiration, though, Keats breaks off—”And should I ever see [visions], I will tell you / Such tales as must with amazement spell you”—in favor of a long, discursive speech by a dying poet who celebrates the joy he has brought the world. Despite the sketchiness of the effort, and Keats’s obvious frustration with himself, this poem and the other Margate epistle, “To Charles Cowden Clarke,” are remarkable for their brave and serious tone of self-exploration. Keats, confronting his indebtedness to other poets and his hopes for himself, had found a theme that would launch his career. He returned to London in late September and took rooms near Guy’s Hospital, 9 Dean Street, and amid the gloomy little alleys began again his work as a dresser until he could formally assume the duties of a surgeon on his twenty-first birthday in October. Dreary as this beginning must have seemed, the month would be fateful for the young poet. Cowden Clarke had been living in London, and this warmhearted schoolmaster was excited to receive the long epistle from Keats. One night in early October, Clarke invited Keats to his rooms in Clerkenwell. He especially wanted to show Keats a volume that was being shown around Hunt’s circle, a 1616 folio edition of George Chapman ‘s translation of Homer. The two friends pored over the volume until six in the morning, and when Keats reached home he sat down immediately to compose a sonnet, titled in manuscript “On the first looking into Chapman’s Homer.” With obvious pride and excitement he sent it to Clarke by a post that reached him at ten that morning. Surely Keats felt, as critics today would agree, that this was the most perfect poem, the most beautifully written and sustained verse, he had yet written. As he would so often, Keats wrote the “Homer” sonnet in response to the power and imaginative vision of another poet. And again, that power is perceived as an absence, a gap between Keats’s small voice—or the concrete experience of any individual—and the sublime limitlessness of a great and distant imagination (this tension reappears in the more complex relation of the poet to the Grecian urn and the nightingale). Unlike his first sonnets, inspired by the natural charm of Hunt’s sonnets, this sonnet is based on a structural principle that he would later bring to perhaps its greatest fulfillment in English poetry in his odes, the expression of the irresolvable contrarieties of experience in the interplay of verse elements—quatrain, octave and sestet, rhymes, words, and even sounds. In this sonnet, the energy and excitement of literary discovery—Keats, in reading Homer, feels not bookish pleasure but the awe of a conquistador reaching the edge of an uncharted sea—is presented as direct emotion, not, as it had been in the epistles, a disabling and self-conscious pose. The emotion is, for the first time, sustained and controlled throughout the verse, with a sureness of diction, and even sound, that never falters: for example, the sense of openness to a vast sea of wonder is suggested by long vowels (“wild,” “surmise,” “silent”), tapering off to hushed awe in the weak syllables of the final word, “Silent, upon a peak in Darien.” As published (with line 7 altered, in The Examiner , 1 December 1816), the sonnet takes its place with Wordsworth’s and some of Keats’s own, as among the finest of the nineteenth century. Keats carefully copied out this sonnet, along with some other poems including the sonnet “How many bards,” and gave them to Clarke to take to Hunt at his Hampstead cottage. Hunt, of course, had published a Keats sonnet, but now was anxious to meet the man himself. Keats responded to Clarke, in a letter of 9 October, “‘t will be an Era in my existence.” It proved to be. Some time that month he met not only Hunt, but also men who were to be close friends and supporters all his life: John Hamilton Reynolds and Benjamin Haydon. Within a few weeks he would meet Shelley ‘s publisher Charles Ollier, who would bring out Keats’s first volume. Hunt recalled of this first meeting “the impression made upon me by the exuberant specimens of genuine though young poetry that were laid before me, and the promise of which was seconded by the fine fervid countenance of the writer. We became intimate on the spot, and I found the young poet’s heart as warm as his imagination.” It was, said Clarke, “`a red-letter day’ in the young poet’s life, and one which will never fade with me while memory lasts… Keats was suddenly made a familiar of the household, and was always welcomed.” This was so to the last months of his life, when the ill poet made his way back to the Hunts’ even though by then Keats had come to judge him egotistical and manipulative and had long since rejected his poetical influence on his career. However trying Keats may have found Hunt, throughout his life he could think of Hampstead as a refuge, Hunt’s pleasant domesticity in his beautiful surroundings harmonizing with the easy urbanity of high Regency culture, of books, paintings, music, liberal politics, and literary conversation with the great talents of the age. Keats himself had moved, in November, to lodgings at 76 Cheapside, with his brothers, George and Tom. Until Tom’s death two years later broke it up, this would be the happiest household Keats would know. He traveled often to Hunt’s in these months, his friendship growing with the witty young Reynolds and the crotchety, energetic egomaniac Haydon. Reynolds, about Keats’s age, was a not too successful poet and essayist, but had a quick mind and literary polish; in the next few weeks he would introduce Keats to John Taylor and James Hessey, who became his publishers after Ollier dropped him; to Charles (Armitage) Brown, the rugged, worldly businessman who was one of Keats’s most loyal friends, traveling with him through Scotland in the summer of 1818, and sharing rooms with him at his home at Wentworth Place, Hampstead (now the Keats House and Museum), from December 1818 until May 1820; Charles and Maria Dilke, who built the double house in Hampstead with Brown; and Benjamin Bailey, an Oxford student with whom Keats stayed the following fall. Haydon’s vast canvases and blustering (later in life, sadly manic), often pugnacious self-assurance impressed Keats with his notion that modern artists could produce great works of epic dimensions; he introduced Keats to William Hazlitt, whose notions of poetic energy, “gusto,” and of imagination as an intensification of sensory experience enabling us to transcend self, were to begin Keats’s own meditations on aesthetics. When Keats stayed at the Hunts’, a cot was set up in the library for him, and it was here, in November and December 1816, he planned his two long poems “I stood tip-toe” and “Sleep and Poetry.” Though the diction of these rhymed couplets is often adolescent, and the syntax turgid, these were the first serious long poems Keats intended for publication, and their themes introduce enduring concerns. Clearly, by November, Hunt had begun to plan a volume of his new protégés verse, with the Olliers as publishers. “I stood tip-toe” was filled out for this purpose, Keats having begun it sometime in the summer as a treatment of the myth of Endymion. In this poem, Keats begins with lush natural description, although his purpose is Wordsworthian, to write poetry inspired by nature that will rise to myth: “For what has made the sage or poet write / But the fair paradise of Nature’s light?” Nature inspires poets to sing sweet songs of mythic figures; but the poet is called by “unearthly singing” from a resting place of the divine, “Full in the speculation of the stars.” This meeting of the divine with the human is symbolized by the marriage of the mortal Endymion with the moon, Cynthia, and initiates a regenerated world of art and poetry: “Was there a Poet born?” in this marriage, the poem asks. Keats finished this poem in December, and tentatively called it “ Endymion ,” his first poetic use of the myth. “Sleep and Poetry,” written in December, is the more serious poem of the two. It lays out a poetic project and manifesto for the young poet. Poetry here is distinguished from mere sleep, or dream, in engaging “the strife of human hearts,” the sorrow of life, as well as proceeding from an immersion in the joys of sensation. Keats boldly aligns himself with Wordsworth’s naturalism, attacking the “foppery” of neoclassicism: he will begin his poetic education in nature in order to comprehend the human heart. The “great end” of poetry is “that it should be a friend / To sooth the cares, and lift the thoughts of man.” The poem ends with the notion of a “brotherhood” of literary cultivation as the poet returns to his evening in Hunt’s library, an ideal union of natural grace, liberality, and poetic tradition. Although these thoughts began with the verse epistles, this poem is his most earnest attempt yet to find a purpose for literature within modern life, and he boldly asserts that a new poetry has begun, a modern humanism with roots in nature and myth. Contemporary critics immediately understood, and condemned, this young poet’s radical associations—more offensive to them than the poem’s occasional Huntian lapses and adolescent posturing. On 1 December, Hunt published in The Examiner a brief notice of “Young Poets”—Shelley, Keats, and Reynolds—extolling a “new school” that would “revive Nature” and “‘put a spirit of youth in everything.’” He quotes in full the “excellent” “Homer” sonnet. At about this time Keats was determined to give up medicine and devote himself to poetry. Stephens believed that this notice “sealed his fate,” and that he immediately changed his mind, but Stephens may not have known the whole story. Charles Brown remembers Keats becoming disillusioned with his career as a surgeon and becoming fearful that he might not be a good enough surgeon to avoid inflicting needless suffering. The truth was undoubtedly a complex mixture of these, but certainly the excitement of these months, and the promise of a published volume, gave him confidence and determination. In December Haydon took his life mask of Keats, as a study for including him (standing behind Wordsworth) in his large painting Christ’s Entry Into Jerusalem , completed in 1819. Later that month, the Hunt household was set into commotion by the arrival of Shelley, whose wife Harriet’s suicide provoked a crisis, as Shelley arranged to marry Mary Godwin (with whom he had eloped in 1814) and fight for custody of his children. The pride and fuss over Keats’s forthcoming volume was shared with the attention Shelley demanded. The two poets walked together across the Heath frequently that winter, and at least once Shelley cautioned Keats to wait for publication until he had a more mature body of work from which to compile a volume. It was perhaps good advice, but Keats never warmed to Shelley as Shelley did to him, and he seems to have been annoyed at Hunt for moving to Marlow for an extended visit with Shelley that spring. Keats’s first volume, Poems , appeared on 3 March 1817, with its dedicatory sonnet to Leigh Hunt. It begins with “I stood tip-toe,” ends with another long poem, “Sleep and Poetry,” and includes youthful poems as well as some recent, good work, “Keen, fitful gusts”; the poem to Wordsworth, Hunt, and Haydon, “Addressed to the Same [Haydon]”; and the three long verse epistles, to Mathew, George Keats, and Clarke. It received about half a dozen notices, half from Keats’s circle. In October 1817 a polite review, warning the young poet to “Cast off the uncleanness of [Hunt’s] school,” appeared in the Edinburgh Magazine, and Literary Miscellany . Months later, in the 1-13 June Examiner , Hunt extolled Wordsworth’s revolutionary modern poetry and placed Keats as an emerging new poet of a second wave, though his praise of Keats’s actual poetry was rather reserved. The volume was no success, and few copies were sold. “The book might have emerged in Timbuctoo,” recalled Clarke. One of the Ollier brothers wrote to George Keats (who perhaps had written to complain about the book’s promotion), “We regret that your brother ever requested us to publish his book… By far the greater number of persons who have purchased it from us have found fault with it in such plain terms, that we have in many cases offered to take the book back rather than be annoyed with the ridicule which has, time after time, been showered upon it.” On 1 March Hunt had invited Keats home to celebrate the publication. After dinner Hunt wove a laurel crown for Keats; Keats wove an ivy one for Hunt; and Hunt then suggested a fifteen-minute sonnet-writing contest to commemorate this event. Keats dashed off a poor, rather silly sonnet, which Hunt published to Keats’s dismay. Horribly embarrassed, angry at Hunt’s frivolity, he sought out Haydon the next day, and the two went to see the Elgin Marbles, which Haydon had been active in persuading the government to buy. Keats wrote his sonnet “ On Seeing the Elgin Marbles “ that evening; it is a splendid evocation of the grandeur of monumental art set against the aspirations of the individual artist, of human weakness and pain poised against an aesthetic vision of the gods. Keats was not deterred by the book’s poor sales. He determined to begin a large poem, on the great theme that he so cannily saw had produced his most serious thought, the striving of man to be one with his ideals, his gods. He resolved to get away, to return to the seaside. Before he left on 14 April for the Isle of Wight, he and his brothers moved to Hampstead, to a home in Well Walk, hoping the country air might be good for young Tom, who was becoming ill. He also arranged for John Taylor, of Taylor and Hessey, to become his new publisher, and this association was, both emotionally and financially, to be a source of real support for years to come. On the Isle of Wight he sat alone for some weeks, writing to Haydon of his new passion for Shakespeare, whom Haydon had read to him with inspiring gusto, whose works he had brought along, and whose portrait he hung up over his desk (he took this portrait with him everywhere all his life). His goal was to write a four-thousand-line poem, Endymion , by autumn. It was an unrealistic, though bold, project, and he sat for weeks anxious and depressed, though moved by the beauty and power of the sea. His friends back home had faith in him, which sustained him: Reynolds wrote a fine review of his Poems in the radical Champion (9 March 1817); Haydon wrote to him, “bless you My dear Keats go on, dont despair… read Shakespeare and trust in Providence”; and Taylor kindly advanced him money—having written to his father, “I cannot think he will fail to become a great Poet.” He did, by the end of April, manage to write part of book I, the “Hymn to Pan.” Yet he was lonely, nervous, and blocked. He fled the Isle of Wight for Margate, where he had been so productive the previous summer. In May he went to Canterbury with Tom, hoping “the Remembrance of Chaucer will set me forward like a Billiard-Ball,” as he wrote to Taylor. By June he was back at Well Walk, Hampstead, spending many days with the quiet, shy, by no means intellectual painter Joseph Severn, who would be with Keats to his last moments in Rome; and also with Reynolds, with whom he read Shakespeare. By August his first extended narrative poem was half finished, a total of two thousand lines. Severn remarked that during these days he noticed the development of Keats’s power of sympathy, of a kind of imaginative identification valued in Keats’s day as the hallmark of poetic sensitivity (William Hazlitt’s teachings reflect this view). Keats was moved to an unusual degree toward almost sensory identification with things around him: “Nothing seemed to escape him, the song of a bird and the undertone of response from covert or hedge, the rustle of some animal,” said Haydon. “The humming of a bee, the sight of a flower, the glitter of the sun, seemed to make his nature tremble!” This power of overcoming self through loving the world’s beauty became a crucial doctrine for Keats—he found his feeling here confirmed by Hazlitt’s theories of imagination—that evolved into a moral principle of love for the good. This doctrine would become Keats’s ultimate justification for the aesthetic life, and it would be implied even as early as Endymion . He worked on the poem throughout the late summer and fall of 1817, writing on a strict plan of at least forty lines a day, a remarkable project for a beginning poet that ultimately, of course, did not produce consistently good poetry. But as an exercise it was both stimulating and courageous, and he emerged a mature, thoughtful, self-critical poet for this effort. During these months, his friendship with Benjamin Bailey deepened, and he saw little of Hunt. “Every one who met him,” Brown recalled of Keats, “sought for his society, and he was surrounded by a little circle of hearty friends.” As Bailey remembered him in those days, thinking back over thirty years, “socially he was the most loveable creature, in the proper sense of that word, as distinguished from amiable , I think I ever knew as a man.” Bailey invited him up to Oxford in September, where amid the beautiful autumn foliage and academic camaraderie of Magdalen College, Bailey crammed for his exams and Keats sat writing daily the third book of Endymion . With Bailey he read and discussed Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Milton, Dante. Bailey, the methodical but energetic scholar, and Keats, lively and intuitive, were excellent study mates, and Keats was able to write with ease and find time in the afternoons for boating on the Isis, strolling in the countryside, and once visiting Shakespeare’s birthplace at Stratford-upon-Avon. He returned from Oxford in October with a new seriousness of thought and purpose; he was weary of Endymion , and though he plodded along with it, he was already planning another long poem. But in London, trouble vexed him: Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (October 1817) published “On the Cockney School of Poetry,” the first of several vicious attacks on Hunt by John Gibson Lockhart and John Wilson, which boded ill for Keats. Keats’s brother Tom was now clearly consumptive, and a trip to the Continent was planned for him; George was out of work and needing money; and Keats himself was ill and being treated with mercury for what was almost surely venereal disease. In late November he left London for the pleasant suburb of Burford Bridge, and there he completed Endymion . Endymion is in many ways a response to Shelley’s Alastor (1816), where a young poet dreams of an ideal mate, in fruitless pursuit of whom he quests across the world, only to die alone and unloved. Keats’s poem begins with a mortal, Endymion, discovered restless and unhappy with the pastoral delights of his kingdom, for he has become enraptured with a dream vision, the moon goddess Cynthia. After a series of adventures, he abandons his restless quest, which by book 4 has come to seem illusory, in favor of an earthly Indian maid, who is eventually revealed to have been Cynthia all along. Although the actual narrative will hardly bear much scrutiny, the themes evoked here would haunt Keats all his life. Only through a love for the earthly is the ideal reached, the real and the ideal becoming one through an intense, sensuous love that leads to a “fellowship with essence.” The theme of a mortal’s love for an ideal figure that proves either illusory or redemptive would be a continuing source of philosophical exploration and ironic play for Keats, as would the paradox of redemption or transcendence evolving from a fuller engagement with human suffering and finitude. The poetry of Endymion varies widely from some thoughtful speeches and lovely description to some of the most awful and self-indulgent verse ever written by a mature major English poet. The story is tedious and the point often obscure. Most of Keats’s circle, including Keats himself, recognized its weaknesses. Yet as a long, sustained work that would broach Keats’s most serious concerns, as a romance that itself attempts to reconsider that genre’s own polarities of human and divine, finite and ideal, erotic love and spiritual transcendence, it was a breakthrough for Keats’s career. The critical reaction to Endymion was infamous for its ferocity. The poem appeared in late April 1818; there was a supportive notice by Bailey in the Oxford University and City Herald (30 May and 6 June 1818) and an extremely perceptive review (by Reynolds or perhaps John Scott) in the Champion (7 and 14 June 1818): “Mr. Keats goes out of himself into a world of abstraction:—his passions, feelings, are all as much imaginative as his situations…when he writes of passion, it seems to have possessed him. This, however, is what Shakespeare did.” But these reviews lacked the sensationalist power of the attacks on Keats, who was associated with Hunt and “the Cockney School.” The two most vicious, written in cool, satiric tones, were John Gibson Lockhart’s in Blackwood’s (dated August 1818, appeared in September) and John Wilson Croker’s in the Quarterly Review (dated April 1818, appeared in September). For Lockhart, who had learned something of Keats’s background, the poem was another sad example of an upstart poet in an age when the celebrity of Robert Burns and Joanna Baillie has “turned the heads of we know not how many farm-servants and unmarried ladies; our very footmen compose tragedies.” He attacked the 1817 Poems and then reacted with horror at the “imperturbable drivelling idiocy of Endymion ,” inspired, he thought by Hunt, “the meanest, the filthiest, and the most vulgar of Cockney poetasters,” compared to whom Keats was but “a boy of pretty abilities.” Croker, in the Quarterly , was unable to “struggle beyond the first of the four books,” whose diction and forced rhyme he found absurd. In the years that followed it was common to believe that these attacks had shaken Keats’s resolve and broken his health: Shelley, for reasons of his own, exaggerated the effect of the conservative reviewers’ savagery (he himself wrote, but did not send, a balanced defense of Endymion , which he privately disliked, although he recognized Keats’s genius). Byron was at first scornful of Keats’s weakness, as Shelley portrayed it to him, but refused to criticize him publicly after his death. Charles Brown, too, spread abroad the notion that Keats had been dealt “his death-blow.” Keats was indeed hurt but not in fact crushed: the nineteenth-century melodrama of Keats’s life being “snuffed out by an Article” (Byron, Don Juan , Canto II, 1823), his frail constitution wrecked, consumption immediately shaking him, is simply false. He showed no signs of tuberculosis for another year, his constitution was by no means frail (he was stocky and athletic), and he was not overly sensitive to criticism. He wrote to James Hessey on 8 October, “My own domestic criticism has given me pain without comparison beyond what Blackwood or the Quarterly could possibly inflict…J. S. [who had written to defend Keats in the 3 October Morning Chronicle ] is perfectly right in regard to the slip-shod Endymion…—The Genius of Poetry must work out its own salvation in a man…That which is creative must create itself—In Endymion, I leaped headlong into the Sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the Soundings, the quicksands, & the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea & comfortable advice.” The fact was that Keats had grown beyond Endymion even before it was completed, nearly a year before these reviews. His association with Bailey in the fall of 1817, and his reading of Hazlitt, contributed to a new seriousness in his thinking about art; on 22 November 1817 he wrote to Bailey the first of his famous letters to his friends and brothers on aesthetics, the social role of poetry, and his own sense of poetic mission. Rarely has a poet left such a remarkable record of his thoughts on his own career and its relation to the history of poetry. The struggle of the poet to create beauty had become itself paradigmatic of spiritual and imaginative quest to perceive the transcendent or the enduring in a world of suffering and death. For Keats, characteristically, this quest for a transcendent truth can be expressed (or even conceived of) only in the terms of an intense, imaginative engagement with sensuous beauty: “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty.” The imagination’s “sublime,” transcending activity is a distillation and intensification of experience. Writing to his brothers at the end of December, he criticized a painting by Benjamin West: “there is nothing to be intense upon; no women one feels mad to kiss; no face swelling into reality. the excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty & Truth—Examine King Lear & you will find this examplified throughout.” The intensity of beauty in art here is not identical to the intensity of actual life—although there is a tendency in all Romantic theory to equate them. Keats emphasizes that the artist remains aloof from single perspectives on life, because truly to paint life’s intensity is to reveal its fiercely dual nature and the precariousness of all attempts to fix or rationalize it: “it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability , that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Keats’s best-known doctrine, Negative Capability, implies an engagement in the actual through imaginative identification that is simultaneously a kind of transcendence. The artist loses the Selfhood that demands a single perspective or “meaning,” identifies with the experience of his/her object, and lets that experience speak itself through him/her. Both the conscious soul and the world are transformed by a dynamic openness to each other. This transformation is art’s “truth,” its alliance with concrete human experience; its “beauty” is then its ability to abstract and universalize from that experience the enduring forms of the heart’s desires. But troubling questions remained, to be worked through not only in letters but, more important, in Keats’s poetry: What does it mean to experience both the intensity of the actual and the beauty of its distilled essence? Does the artist not demand more answers from real life than the disinterestedness of Negative Capability can offer? And, most urgent, is not aesthetic distillation really a kind of a falsification, a dangerous and blind succumbing to enchantment? Is the “truth” of experience only that pain accompanies all joy and cannot be transcended? Certainly without the transforming power of art, at least, growing self-consciousness implies knowledge of loss and death; perhaps even art does no more than deflect our attention. In early December 1817 Keats had written one of his most compressed lyrics on this theme, “In drear-nighted December,” where the passing of the seasons brings no pain to nature but only self-conscious sorrow to humanity. And in January 1818, in the sonnet “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again,” he resolves to leave wandering in the “barren dream” of “golden-tongued Romance” to be “consumed in the fire” and reborn as a poet of tragic insight. In these months, the winter of 1817-1818, Keats returned to Shakespeare and to Wordsworth with renewed interest and a real deepening of aesthetic judgment and complexity, spurred by his attendance at William Hazlitt’s lectures on poetry at the Surrey Institution. In the course of his own poetic development he would challenge Hazlitt’s ideas of poetic “gusto” and aesthetic disinterestedness with questions like those above. But with what sympathy and excitement he must have heard Hazlitt say of Shakespeare that a great poet “was nothing in himself: but he was all that others were, or that they could become…When he conceived of a character, whether real or imaginary, he not only entered into all its thoughts and feelings, but seemed instantly, and as if by touching a secret spring, to be surrounded with all the same objects.” At the end of January 1818 he wrote his first Shakespearean sonnet, “When I have fears that I may cease to be,” one of his finest: even in this first line one hears the Shakespearean counterpoint of sound, which is sustained throughout with a sure mastery of vocalic music. As he had before, Keats developed this sonnet along lines of antithesis, here taking off from the Shakespearean theme of time, death, and art; but Keats transformed these into a struggle along a borderline of vision (“the shore / Of the wide world”) between a poet’s aspiration after “high romance” and his fear of sinking into obscurity and death. In Hazlitt’s lectures Keats would have heard the critic both praise and attack the new naturalism of Wordsworth, forcing him in his letters to consider his own position. In late December 1817 Keats met Wordsworth himself, through Haydon, who the year before had sent him a Keats sonnet, “Great spirits now on earth are sojourning,” which Wordsworth admired. One of these meetings was social gathering Haydon dubbed his “Immortal Dinner,” attended by Keats, Wordsworth, Lamb, Reynolds, and others. Here Keats read his “Hymn to Pan” from Endymion , Wordsworth pronouncing it “a very pretty piece of Paganism.” Although it is not clear that Wordsworth meant to belittle the verse, the tone of condescension was not lost on Keats or his friends. Keats was not overly hurt, however, since he saw Wordsworth several times more in London, dining with his family on 5 January 1818. That Wordsworth had revolutionized poetry Keats never doubted; but his sense of the man’s egotism did enforce his fear that contemporary poetry, however truer to experience than the assured mythmaking of a Milton, ran the risk of trivial or “obtrusive” self-absorption. In a letter to Reynolds written 3 February 1818 after a visit to the famous Mermaid Tavern (frequented by Ben Jonson , John Fletcher , and Sir Francis Beaumont), he longed for a poetry of “unobtrusive” beauty, “Let us have the old Poets, & Robin Hood.” He enclosed his own “Lines on the Mermaid tavern,” and “ Robin Hood “; but he knew that in fact the modern situation worked against poetry of unself-conscious grandeur. For the time being, he was perplexed, and his poetry proceeded slowly. He continued to prepare Endymion for the press. The winter months were full of social activity, with visits to Haydon, dinner at the Hunts with the Shelleys and Peacock, and evenings at the theater. In early March, however, his brother George arrived in London to see Abbey, leaving Tom ill and unattended. Keats departed at once to stay with him in Teignmouth, Devonshire, where he remained until May. With Tom feverish and coughing, with the news that George had decided to immigrate to America, with his sense of being obliged to be far from the stimulation of London but fearful of losing both his brothers, these were sad months. Poetically, as Endymion was finished and a new poem, Isabella , begun, it was a time of intense introspection and transition marking Keats’s emergence as a poet whose most authentic subject would be the difficulties of writing romance itself, the genre paradigmatic for Keats of the transforming power of art, of the simple wonder of storytelling. Romance also implies a quest for closure, for a realized (or at least clearly envisioned) dream, and Keats questioned whether modern poetry can embody such belief. The romance he wrote in March 1818, Isabella , based on a tale of Boccaccio, is an uneven poem, and though some of his contemporaries (including Lamb) admired it, Keats came to dislike it. It is best thought of as an experiment in tone, teetering uneasily between poignant, romantic tragedy and a dry, uneasy, narrational pose. This poem is a first attempt—and an interesting one—at that extraordinary poise he would achieve between romance and disillusionment almost a year later in The Eve of St. Agnes . But his mood in March is reflected in a letter to Reynolds on the twenty-fifth, containing a verse epistle, “Dear Reynolds,” in which he is most deeply suspicious of “Imagination brought / Beyond its proper bound,” that makes real life seem painful and cold, “spoils the singing of the Nightingale.” He can no longer be lifted by romance: “I saw too distinct into the core / Of an eternal fierce destruction.” He was uneasy with the tale he is telling in Isabella . The story from Boccaccio is simple, and Keats made few changes: Isabella, living with her two merchant brothers, loves Lorenzo, a clerk. The brothers, vile and materialistic, murder Lorenzo and bury him in the forest. Guided by Lorenzo’s ghost, Isabella discovers the body, exhumes it, severs the head, buries it in a pot of basil, and, weeping over the plant until her brothers take it from her, she dies mad. Again, the interest here is in Keats’s tone: he resists the tendency to sentimentality, displaying real compassion for the victim of greed, but also lingering with bizarre interest (“Ah! wherefore all this wormy circumstance?” he asks at one point) on the realistic elements of physical decay and psychological derangement. And the lamentations (“O Melancholy, linger here awhile!”) are carried on with an excess that borders on arch humor. Keats later dismissed Isabella as “mawkish”; most likely he soon saw that the poem revealed awkwardly his growing self-consciousness about the complexity of romance to the modern sensibility. But did this realization mean the modern poet could not write poetry of “vision” or “grandeur?” This question is the challenge to his career, as he takes it up in a long, remarkable letter to Reynolds on 3 May 1818. The letter is critical for understanding Keats’s mature thought. The letter takes for granted the general view of the Hunt-Shelley circle of progressives that there is “a grand march of intellect,” that the arts advance with the development of knowledge, and that both art and science, “by widening speculation... ease the Burden of the Mystery.” Like Hunt and Shelley, Keats expressed ambivalence about Wordsworth, whose great genius had expressed the modern, secular sensibility yet seemed too “circumscribed” to celebrate either the era’s buoyant optimism or its new scientific skepticism in a visionary myth. (Keats, of course, knew the Wordsworth of the reactionary Excursion , published in 1814, but not of The Prelude , first published in 1850.) Keats was uncertain “whether Miltons apparently less anxiety for Humanity proceeds from his seeing further or no than Wordsworth: And whether Wordsworth has in truth epic passion, and martyrs himself to the human heart, the main region of his song.” Keats felt that for Milton religious faith came easily, with the great “emancipation” of the Reformation; but Wordsworth’s poetry had greater potential depth if perhaps more limited scope, the awakening of the soul to knowledge of its suffering. “Here,” wrote Keats, “I must think Wordsworth is deeper than Milton,” though perhaps that depth is forced on him by his place in intellectual history. Keats saw the working through of this challenge as his place in history as well. If this conception of “modern” literature derived from progressives such as Hazlitt, Hunt, Shelley, and Peacock, nevertheless, Keats brought to it his own distrust of their utopianism and his sense of tragedy cutting across the Promethean aspirations of the individual artist. Moreover, his goal was a kind of aesthetic detachment or “disinterestedness” that could transform pathos into a real, tragic vision, the Negative Capability he suspected Wordsworth lacked. He seems to have discovered that the way to Negative Capability was an arduous one, a descent into pain rather than ascent into romance. Using one of his best-known metaphors, he described human life as both he and Wordsworth perceived it: “I compare human life to a large Mansion of Many Apartments, two of which I can only describe…—The first we step into we call the infant or thoughtless Chamber, in which we remain as long as we do not think…” From this state of innocence we are impelled into the “Chamber of Maiden-Thought,” where knowledge is exhilarating but soon discloses that “the World is full of Misery and Heart-break, Pain, Sickness and oppression,” and the chamber darkens. The Wordsworth of “Tintern Abbey” explored the dark chambers of experience, and “Now, if we live, and go on thinking, we too shall explore them.” As for the aesthetic result, the possibility of such humanizing producing great poetry, that can be judged only by experience itself, for “axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses.” The letter is remarkable indeed for its sense of poetic “mission,” but equally striking is Keats’s sense that poetry in his era would become a questioning of its own processes of interpreting and articulating concrete experience. On these matters he would meditate the better part of the summer, and though he wrote little throughout these months, these would now be his dominant concerns. One can see them in his great poem Hyperion , begun in October. In June Tom seemed better, and Keats decided to accompany Charles Brown on a walking tour of the Lake District and Scotland. Keats hoped this would be the first of a series of travels in England and abroad to prepare him to write. The trip through the Lake country was invigorating; Keats and Brown energetically hiked in the mountains around Rydal and Ambleside. In the evenings Keats wrote long journal letters to Tom filled with natural detail and excited purpose: “I shall learn poetry here,” he wrote amid the rocks and waterfalls, “and shall henceforth write more than ever…” In Scotland the weather turned rainy and chill, and Keats became ill with a sore throat that would plague him for months after. This illness was not connected to his later tuberculosis, but for the next year he would have occasional recurrences of the sore throat. Though he was always aware of the consumption that seemed to curse his family, and his bouts with illness this year were often depressing, there is no reason to believe he thought at this time that these sore throats were dangerous or that his poetic career would be cut short. In early August, leaving Brown in Scotland, Keats returned home to Hampstead to find his brother Tom seriously ill with tuberculosis. In June, George, now married, had immigrated to America to try his luck as a farmer (after several inevitable disasters he did prosper, in the 1830s, as a miller in Louisville, Kentucky); Keats was now alone with Tom, almost constantly, until his death on 1 December. But throughout the autumn of 1818 he began composing his most brilliant work yet, a poem even his critics saw as a major achievement, Hyperion . Keats’s biographer Walter Jackson Bate has observed that the year that began with the fragment epic Hyperion “may be soberly described as the most productive in the life of any poet of the past three centuries.” One senses, too, in this annus mirabilis, an unprecedented engagement with three centuries of literary convention, a stretching out and probing of the limits of epic, ode, pastoral, and romance that realigns these forms with Keats’s modern sense of an uncanny reciprocity between myth and history, fantasy and experience, noble aspiration and tragic disillusionment. This is the stuff of Hyperion , and its interest is its fresh engagement with these issues, as they cluster around a traditional Western icon: the fall into suffering of the mighty or good and the hope for compensatory redemption. Hyperion tells the story of the fall of the Titans and their replacement by the Gods, more beautiful than the Titans by virtue of their superior knowledge, and, so, by implication, their insight into the suffering of humanity.

The epic begins not with the battle between Titans and Gods but with its aftermath. The opening lines are as solemn and subdued as any Keats wrote: “Deep in the shady sadness of a vale / Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn, / Far from the fiery noon, and eve’s one star, / Sat grayhaired Saturn, quiet as a stone.” All the Saturnians have fallen into a dark, still world, where time itself creeps slowly into their dawning senses. All but Hyperion have fallen, and some hope he will lead a revolt against the upstart Jove and prevent Apollo from directing the sun’s course. Like so many romantic epics, however, this one begins with an extraordinary sense of stasis, of emotional confusion, pain, and paralysis from which there is no apparent exit. The speeches of the fallen Titans are useless. Saturn is helpless and confused; Thea, his wife, can only grieve; Enceladus counsels war but can do no more than bluster; and Oceanus delivers a key speech (modeled on Ulysses’ speech on degree in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida ) in which he sees history as an ordered, inevitable progress that leaves behind much that is beautiful in favor of a greater beauty and perfection. Hyperion tries in vain to force the sun to rise but falls back in impotent grief. Finally, Apollo is born a god through the most painful vision of tragic knowledge, and “with fierce convulse / Die[s] into life.” The fragment breaks off here. The most direct source for this council of fallen Titans is, of course, Milton ‘s Paradise Lost (1667), and Keats’s blank-verse epic is, at least partly, “Miltonic.” But the differences are great; Keats’s verse does not often, in its densely beautiful descriptions, subtle assonances, and emphasis on the verse line, resemble the heavier Latinate Miltonic syntax. But more important, Keats’s victims begin unable to define their plight or even comprehend how they differ from gods and came to fall. Their fall is in the nature of some cosmic process, echoing the Romantic age’s fascination with historical revolutionary forces (the parallel to Napoleon and the French Revolution has been suggested), with lost golden ages succeeded by self-conscious, demythologized modernity. The reader also understands the personal relevance to Hyperion of Keats’s conception of the modern poet, born to Apollo’s radiance by his identification with human suffering. The fall into self-consciousness would itself be redemptive if it formed the soul of a poet, whose creation of beauty is the more intense for his having felt and transcended tragic pain and the loss of faith.

Yet the poem proved too problematic, and for many reasons by April 1819 Keats had given it up. As many critics have noted, Keats may have attempted a cool, “disinterested” sympathy with both Hyperion and Apollo, but there were elements of himself in the suffering of both that were hard to overcome. If Apollo’s knowledge deifies him, Hyperion’s more passive suffering and dark bewilderment are tragically compelling. What would be the dramatic focus of the poem? As Keats nursed his consumptive brother Tom, he must have felt the difficulties of rising to Negative Capability—even its moral impossibility in the face of Tom’s dying agony. What good, really, to speak of either inevitable human progress or the birth of a poet in the face of such pain? This indeed would be the subject of Hyperion when Keats attempted to revise it in summer 1819 as The Fall of Hyperion .

Keats had spent the autumn almost constantly with Tom and saw few of his friends. On 1 December 1818, the day of Tom’s death, Charles Brown invited Keats to come live with him at Wentworth Place, now the Keats House, Hampstead. It was a double house Brown had built with his friend Charles Dilke, who lived with his wife in one half. In the previous summer while he was away, Brown rented his side of the house to a widow, Mrs. Frances Brawne, and her three children, the oldest of whom, Fanny, was just eighteen. They later continued to visit the Dilkes at Wentworth. Here, probably in November, Keats met Fanny. This house, with Brown a constant companion, and the Dilkes and later Fanny and her mother renting next door, would be Keats’s last real home in England.

Keats’s relationship to Fanny Brawne has tantalized generations of lovers of his poetry. Unfortunately, some key aspects of that relationship are, and will likely remain, obscure. It seems that on 25 December 1818 they declared their love; they were engaged (though without much public announcement) in October 1819. But Keats felt he could not marry until he had established himself as a poet—or proved to himself he could not. What Fanny felt is hard to know. Keats burned all but her last letters, which were buried with him. She later married and lived most of her life abroad; her written remarks about Keats reveal little about her feelings. From Keats’s letters we get a picture of a lively, warm-hearted young woman, fashionable and social. She respected Keats’s vocation but did not pretend to be literary.

Readers of Keats’s letters to her are moved—or shocked—by their frank passion, their demands upon a sociable young girl for seriousness and attention to a suffering, dying, lonely man, insecure in all his achievements, asking only for her saving love. But it would be wrong to judge Keats (or Fanny) by the letters of 1820, written by a Keats at times desperate and confused, feverish and seriously ill. Almost certainly, as would have been conventional in their day for a couple so uncertain of their future, their relationship was not sexual. But it was passionate and mutual, certainly becoming the central experience of intense feeling in both their lives. It was to Fanny he addressed one of his most direct, passionate love poems, “Bright Star,” which she copied out in a volume of Dante that Keats gave her in April 1819, but which may have been written four or five months earlier. Even here, however, the intensity of experience is not simple: humans may desire the “stedfastness” of the stars only in a paradoxical “sweet unrest,” an ecstasy of passion both intense and annihilating, a kind of “swoon to death,” fulfilling but inhumanly “unchangeable.”

Keats explores these antinomies of human desire in one of his finest and best-loved long poems, The Eve of St. Agnes , a romance in Spenserian stanzas written in January 1819. The story recalls Romeo and Juliet , though its details are based on several traditional French romances (see Robert Gittings, John Keats , 1968). In Keats’s hands the story itself is less important than what, through a highly self-conscious art, it becomes, a meditation on desire and its fulfillment, on wishes, dreams, and romance. It is framed by the coldness of eternity, by an ancient Beadsman whose frosty prayers and stony piety contrast with the fairytale-like revelry and warm lights within. The heroine, Madeline, does not mix with the company but ascends to her own kind of dream, the superstitious wish that, by following various rites on this St. Agnes’ Eve, her future husband will appear in her dreams. Porphyro, of some feuding clan, has crept into the party, and is aided by Angela, the old nurse, in a “strategem”: he will sneak into her room and fulfill the dream, wakening her to his warm, real presence. He does so, after watching her undress and sleep, spreading before her a feast of delicacies (rather magically), and easing her into a wakefulness instinct with romance. The lovers flee into the cold storm; and suddenly the poem shifts to a long historical vision, the tale acknowledged as a story far away and long ago, the Beadsman himself cold and dead.

The moment of Madeline’s awakening is a crucial one, pointing out the poem’s central dilemma. Porphyro must waken her to his real presence, but his fulfillment also depends on his “melting” into her dream. The moment is typical of so many romantic “falls” from innocence to experience: the consummation of their love “is no dream,” says Porphyro, but Madeline weeps in fear that he has betrayed her. “Sweet dreamer!” Porphyro then responds, “‘tis an elfin storm from faery land,” into which he will carry her to be his bride, “o’er the southern moors.” In the nineteenth century, Hunt and others admired the rich pictorial beauty, the beautiful contrasts of warmth and chill, sensuality and religion, color and gray. Today we see the poem more as a great achievement not only in style but also in thoughtful and carefully balanced tone. Some modern critics, including Earl Wasserman, have the story arguing for success of imagination and warm love over cold piety; others, such as Jack Stillinger, have argued that Keats meant to debunk the conventions of fairy tale by suggesting that Porphyro’s motive is a rather sinister seduction. But most critics today see the poem as an extraordinary balance of these opposing forces, shrewdly and at times playfully self-aware of its own conventions, leading the reader to a continuous series of mediations between artifice and reality, dream and awakening. Finally, waking life seems to require some degree of enchantment to be humanly fulfilling; yet dreaming, being “taken in”—as one is by the rich tapestry of The Eve of St. Agnes —is precarious, and the deeper one sleeps the ruder one’s awakenings.

This dialectical probing of enchantment, of the always-threatened artifice by which imagination seeks its fulfillment in the world, initiates Keats’s most profound meditations in the spring of 1819. The dangers of enchantment deepen in the haunting, beautifully suggestive ballad, “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” written 21 or 28 April 1819, and published in a slightly altered version by Hunt in his Indicator of 10 May 1820. Here a knight-at-arms is seduced by a strange, fairylike woman, reminiscent of Morgan Le Fay or Merlin’s Niniane, and in the midst of this enchantment a warning dream comes to him from other lost princes and warriors. But his awakening from her does him little good; he wanders “palely” on “the cold hill’s side,” where “no birds sing,” a world as empty of charm as the fay’s was empty of real life. The poem has been seen as allegorical of Keats’s ambivalent feelings for Fanny Brawne or for poetry itself. More fundamental, though, is Keats’s growing sense, here and in his letters, of the dark ironies of life, that is, the ways in which evil and beauty, love and pain, aspiration and finitude, are not so much “balanced” as interwoven in ways that resist philosophical understanding. The more we imagine beauty the more painful our world may seem—and this, in turn, deepens our need for art.

The great odes of the spring and fall— Ode to Psyche , Ode to a Nightingale , Ode on a Grecian Urn , Ode on Melancholy , To Autumn (written in September), Ode on Indolence (not published until 1848, and often excluded from the group as inferior)—do not attempt to answer these questions. They rather explore the ironies of our attempts to answer them and of poetry’s attempts to articulate them. The order of the odes has been much debated; it is known that Ode to Psyche was written in late April, Ode to a Nightingale probably in May, and To Autumn on 19 September 1819, but although Ode on a Grecian Urn and Ode on Melancholy are assumed to belong to May, but no one can be certain of any order or progression. In style and power the odes represent Keats’s finest poetry; indeed, they are among the greatest achievements of Romantic art.

The myth of Psyche—the mortal who is loved by Eros himself and who, after many trials, is deified—was well known in Peacock and Hunt’s circle, its allegorical implications much discussed. Briefly, for Keats, who read the tale in Apuleius and in a contemporary poem by Mary Tighe, Psyche, the human spirit, becomes a goddess late, after the older gods, the Olympians, have already “faded.” In Keats’s Ode to Psyche the poet initially has a vision that seems to be a dream: as he wanders “thoughtlessly” he comes upon Psyche and Eros making love. But for a modern poet such visions do not come unself-consciously—”Surely I dreamt to—day, or did I see / ... ?” For Keats, as for Shelley and Peacock, Christianity had destroyed the naive visionary power of a mythic relation to nature. But, perhaps, a new kind of humanist paganism was possible to a modern world of self-consciousness and secular knowledge, emptied of Christian orthodoxy. Psyche, the human soul, is deified “Too, too late for the fond believing lyre,” but perhaps may be made present to the poet through the hard, painful work of growing self-awareness. The poem concludes with the goddess humanized and internalized, her temple now to be built, “In some untrodden region of my mind.” There the poet will labor amid “branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain” in a garden prepared for her appearance. Thus the poem turns from its questioned but spontaneous vision to a hope for a return of Psyche in a prepared consciousness. While Apuleius’s Psyche met Eros in a darkened room, Keats will provide “A bright torch, and a casement ope at night, / To let the warm Love in!” Ode to Psyche has been understood in the context of Keats’s earlier notions of the modern poet, for whom Christian faith in otherworldly rewards can no longer provide a justification for human suffering. Now an openness to nature and erotic love, and a sense of the value of self-consciousness to the spirit can alone produce mature art: “Do you see not how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul?” he wrote to his brother in the letter of 21 April 1819 in which he enclosed this ode.

But despite the sense of achieved conclusion, Ode to Psyche begins with a question and ends with a hope. The unself-conscious and delightful initial vision can only be expectantly invoked. The whole notion that art or imagination may provide some middle ground between the gods and humanity is questioned in the greatest and most complex of Keats’s lyrics, Ode on a Grecian Urn and Ode to a Nightingale . Though Keats had worked hard and long on Ode to Psyche , the Nightingale ode, if Charles Brown’s memory is correct, was written with amazing speed. He recalled that Keats, one morning in the spring, on hearing a nightingale’s song, “took his chair from the breakfast table to the grass—plot under a plum tree, where he sat for two or three hours.” Brown later saw him stuff behind his books some papers which proved to be his poem. In a sense the spontaneous joy of the bird’s song recalls the visionary realm of Ode to Psyche ; but in this poem, the “pleasant pain” of self-awareness is not so pleasant, and the transcendent is both elusive and perhaps inapplicable to the human. Ode to a Nightingale begins not with a vision but with a dull, unexplained pain, not a pain at all but a vague “ache” of emptiness and “drowsy numbness.” Although we expect the bird’s joyful singing to inspire and regenerate the poet, it does not, or at least not in any simple way. Instead what follows is a troubled meditation, one of the richest and most compressed in English poetry, on the power of human imagination to meet joy in the world and transform the soul.

In Ode to a Nightingale , the poet attempts to flee the “weariness, the fever, and the fret,” of our tragic existence, “Where youth grows pale, and spectre—thin, and dies,” first through an ecstasy of intoxication and then “on the viewless wings of Poesy,” through imagination itself. In the crucial and difficult middle section of the poem, the mind attempting both to transcend life and remain aware of itself becomes lost in a dark wild, an “embalmed darkness” of fleeting sensations that suggests not escape but its very opposite, death. But the nightingale—or, rather, its song as the imagination elaborates upon it—is immortal, and in “ancient days” belonged to a world of enchantment. It is the same song, “that oft—times hath / Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam / Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.” With these beautiful words the poem turns about, the word forlorn shocking the poet into awareness. The beauty of an imagined “long ago” suggested by this word ( forlorn = “long ago”) turns by a sad pun ( forlorn = “sad”) into a remarkable moment of pained self-consciousness. The bird flies off, and “the fancy cannot cheat so well / As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf. / ... / Was it a vision or a waking dream? / Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?” The poem ends by dismantling its own illusion.

That illusion, or trope, is that imagination, by creating permanence and beauty, may allow the individual himself a transcendence of the mind’s fleeting sensations, like the bird’s song. But imagination needs temporality to do its work. It then tantalizes us with a desire to experience the eternity of the beauty we create. But again, no real experience is possible to us—as the central stanzas suggest—apart from time and change. Imagination seems to falsify: the more the poet presses the bird to contain, the more questionable this imaginative projection becomes. For Keats, an impatience for truth only obscures it. If art redeems experience at all it is in the beauty of a more profound comprehension of ourselves (not of a transcendent realm), of the paradoxes of our nature. To expect art to provide a more certain closure is to invite only open questions or deeper enigmas. In Ode on a Grecian Urn this theme is explored from the perspective not of a natural and fleeting experience (the bird song) but of a work of pictorial art, a timeless rendering of a human pageant.

Perhaps more has been written on this poem, per line, than any other Romantic lyric. And today it is perhaps the best—known and most—often-read poem in nineteenth-century literature. No one knows whether Keats had in mind a particular urn: it is known that he drew or traced a vase portrayed in a volume of engravings, Musée Napoléon , that he saw at Haydon’s; and certainly his visits to the British Museum provided other examples as well. The poem seems to be an imaginative creation of an artwork that serves as an image of permanence. Though the urn depicts a passionate scene of dance and erotic pursuit, it itself remains a “still unravish’d bride of quietness,” transcendent and calm. Probing the apparent timelessness of pictorial art is the action of the poem’s speaker, as he attempts to force some meaning from the form. But it is in the nature of poetry, unlike painting—a distinction we know Keats often debated with Haydon—to create its meaning sequentially. The poet thus imagines a narrative , albeit one frozen by the pictorial medium: “Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave / Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare.” This seems to be a moment, like that of the “Bright Star” sonnet, of eternal consummation: “More happy love! more happy, happy love! / For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d, / For ever panting, and for ever young; / All breathing human passion far above....” And yet, as most critics would agree, the mawkishness of the repeated “happy” reveals the strained paradox by which the imagined narrative develops. Human happiness requires fulfillment in a world of process and inevitable loss. The lovers are “forever panting,” since fulfillment outside of temporal process is a contradiction forced on the urn by the very logic of the speaker’s questioning. The further the questions are pushed the more they seem to reveal only the artifice of the questioner, not the urn’s hidden truth.

In the poem’s fourth stanza the poet imagines a deserted town whose people had provided the urn its images but who are themselves forever silent, dead, unknown. As in the Nightingale ode, the poet’s attempt to imagine a timeless realm ends in his facing a desolation, an absence of human life. And again, wordplay restores a thoughtful distance between speaker and object, in this case the oxymoron “Cold pastoral!” and the witty puns on “brede” and “overwrought” revealing the paradox informing the poem all along. There follow, however, the most debated lines in Keats’s poetry, the sudden, concluding speech to the suffering generations of mankind from the silent urn,” ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” (the punctuation of the lines is significant for interpretation but disputed: see Stillinger’s edition). Because the urn has revealed more of the mysterious incommensurability between human truth and eternal beauty, the lines have seemed to some critics an awkward intrusion on the poem’s studied indeterminacy. Others see the lines dissolving all doubts in an absolute aestheticism that declares the power of art to transform painful truths into beauty. Still others have found them an appropriately riddling oracle to questions that art cannot answer with consecutive reasoning, thus calming the speaker’s anxious probing. This critical debate itself testifies to the dramatic richness of the poem’s debate, for the poet, with wit and irony, has imagined a response fully appropriate and articulate from the urn’s eternal perspective, but nonetheless from the human perspective riddling and as elusive as the initial silence.

In the Ode on Melancholy the subject is not the ironies of our experience of art but of intense experience itself. Melancholy is not just a mood associated with sad objects; in this poem, it is the half-hidden cruel logic of human desire and fulfillment. In our temporal condition the most intense pleasure shades off into emptiness and the pain of loss, fulfillment even appearing more intense as it is more ephemeral. Keats’s thinking, then, had matured with remarkable speed from the poet of Endymion , for whom a poetry of intense sensation was itself a model of transcendence. His maturing irony had developed into a re-evaluation and meditative probing of his earlier concerns, the relation of art and the work of imagination to concrete experience. But the odes also show supreme formal mastery: from the play of rhyme (his ode stanza is a brilliantly compressed yet flexible development from sonnet forms), to resonance of puns and woven vowel sounds, the form itself embodies the logic of a dialogue among conflicting and counterbalancing thoughts and intuitions.

It has often been pointed out that the thinking in Ode on Melancholy on the paradox of desire emerges as much from Keats’s experience as from abstract meditation. By May 1819 Keats’s relationship to Fanny Brawne was strained by her again moving next door, intensifying his frustration and anger at himself that he could not provide for her and marry her. He must have felt that he could never have a sexual relationship with her or a “normal” married life while his career, and soon his health, was so uncertain. Adding to this concern, in June, were severe financial pressures, including news that George’s wife was pregnant and the couple in dire need as they tried to establish themselves in America. Keats considered giving poetry a last try, but returned all the books he had borrowed and thought of becoming a surgeon, perhaps on a ship. Brown persuaded him to make one more attempt at publishing, and he wrote to Haydon, “My purpose now is to make one more attempt in the Press if that fail, `ye hear no more of me’ as Chaucer says...” In July he left for Shanklin, the Isle of Wight, where he would stay with his ailing friend, James Rice, to begin his last and most intense session of writing.

Keats was ill this summer with a sore throat, and it is likely that the early stages of tuberculosis were beginning. His letters to Fanny Brawne became jealous, even tormented. But throughout the summer he wrote with furious concentration, working on his rather bad verse tragedy Otho the Great , which Brown had concocted as a scheme to earn money, and completing Lamia , his last full-length poem.

The plot of this difficult poem came from Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), which Keats had been reading in the spring. The treatment, however, fraught with double-edged ironies, is Keats’s own. A young man, Lycius, falls in love with a beautiful witch, Lamia, who is presented with real sympathy. She leads Lycius away from his public duties into an enchanted castle of love. But at their marriage banquet Lamia withers and dies under the cold stare of the rationalist philosopher Apollonius, who sees through her illusion, and Lycius, too, dies as his dream is shattered. The issues, of course, recall The Eve of St. Agnes , but here the balance of beautiful but destructive enchantment / harsh but public and solid reality is portrayed with dramatic directness and power. One’s sympathies are divided between two characters, the extremely rational and the extremely enchanted, and one’s feelings about Lamia herself are divided, depending on whether one adopts her immortal perspective or Apollonius’s human one. To many readers, it has seemed that these unresolvable ironies imply a bitterness about love and desire. It is clear, though, that Keats sought to present his story without sentimentality or the lush beauty of romance.

Yet Keats was striving for some sense of resolution in these months, as autumn approached. He turned back to Hyperion with the thought of justifying the life of the poet as both self-conscious and imaginative, committed to the real, public sphere even while his imagination soothes the world with its dreams. This strange, troubling, visionary fragment, The Fall of Hyperion (unpublished until 1856), is his most ambitious attempt to understand the meaning of imaginative aspiration. It is a broad Dantesque vision, in which the poet himself is led by Moneta, goddess of knowledge, to the painful birth into awareness of suffering that had deified the poet-god Apollo in the earlier version. Moneta’s tragic wisdom challenges the poet in his vision with his own deepest fears, that imagination is the source of misery, conjuring ideals that for mortals only cause pain. If so, the whole “modern” romantic conception of imaginative life would be a snare, leaving mankind empty of real belief in favor of fragile illusions. Better not to “fall,” to remain an unself-conscious laborer for human good. But while the poet accepts that poets are not as exalted as the socially committed who directly reform the world, he argues that surely “a poet is a sage; / A humanist, physician to all men.” Moneta distinguishes the poet from the mere “dreamer” whose imagination feeds only on its own idealisms (like Lycius in Lamia ); true poets have awakened their imaginations to tragic pain while yet striving to redeem sorrow with visionary acceptance and compassion. Yet the climactic vision of the poem, the poet’s parting of Moneta’s veils, reveals a withered face of continuous dying, of unredeemed tragic knowledge. A far darker poem than Hyperion , The Fall of Hyperion achieves no resolutions but rather presents both Keats’s most tragic vision and his fragile but most clearly expressed hope for the redemptive imagination.

Both this poem and his last great lyric, To Autumn , seem, in their nearly opposite ways, to summarize the themes of Keats’s entire career. Written 19 September 1819, at Winchester, where he and Brown had moved in August, it was inspired by a walk in the chill, crisp countryside: “I never lik’d stubble fields so much as now—Aye better than the chilly green of the spring. Somehow a stubble plain looks warm”—he wrote to Reynolds of that day. The ode is Keats’s most perfect poem; as Bate says, generations of readers “have found it one of the most perfect poems in English.” Written with the same controlled visionary power in the face of death as The Fall of Hyperion , the tone of the ode is, however, an acceptance of process, setting the human experience of time within the larger cycles of nature. Notably, the speaker here never appears as a subject, except implicitly as a calming presence, asking questions but allowing the sights, sounds, and activities of the season itself to answer them. The poem’s three stanzas move through a process of ripening, then reaping and gleaning and pressing, to a final vision of “soft-dying day” still alive with sounds of bleating lambs and singing birds. The richness of sound creates an intensity of ripeness: “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, / Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun”; note too the words swell, plump, budding , and o’er-brimmed . But the intensity here, unlike that of Ode to Melancholy , does not end in extinction and painful memory. Such subjectivity is avoided; the season is mythologized and imagined as herself a part of the rhythms of the year. The final stanza momentarily recalls the feeling of loss: “Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?” But in immediate response, the poet soothes the goddess figure herself with the injunction, “Think not of them, thou hast thy music too.” No singular loss is without recompense, in the larger, essentially comic vision of nature’s transforming, renewing power. In the last lines, the present-tense verbs give a sense of an intense present that gathers up the past and is impelled toward the future: “The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; / And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.” Here, for the first time in the odes, intense experience and mythological vision achieve a poised, dialectical balance within a purely natural context.

This poem would effectively mark the end of Keats’s poetic career. He lived to see his new volume, which included the odes, published as Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems in early July 1820. The praise from Hunt, Shelley, Lamb, and their circle was enthusiastic. In August, Frances Jeffrey, influential editor of the Edinburgh Review , wrote a serious and thoughtful review, praising not just the new poems but also Endymion . Other reviews, particularly John Scott’s in the September 1820 London Magazine , were suddenly respectful of the new power of his verse, particularly of the odes and Hyperion , this last considered, in Keats’s generation, his greatest achievement. The volume sold slowly but steadily and increasingly in the next months. His odes were republished in literary magazines. But by summer 1820, Keats was too ill to be much encouraged.

The story of Keats’s last year makes sad reading. In the winter of 1819 he nearly decided to give up poetry and write for some London review. He was often confused and depressed, worried about money, often desperate with the pain of being unable to marry Fanny Brawne, to whom he became openly engaged about October. Dilke, Brown, and visitors to Wentworth Place became concerned for his health and his state of mind: “from this period,” wrote Dilke, “his weakness & his sufferings, mental & bodily, increased—his whole mind & heart were in a whirl of contending passions—he saw nothing calmly or dispassionately.” He even, on the verge of concluding publishing arrangements with Taylor in November, declared he would publish no more until he had completed a new, greater poem (probably The Fall of Hyperion ) or perhaps a drama. But Keats continued to prepare his poems for publication, and to work on The Fall of Hyperion and a new satiric drama, The Jealousies (first published as The Cap and Bells ), never completed. Then, in February 1820, came the lung hemorrhage that convinced him he was dying. Brown’s account is simple and moving: “one night, at eleven o’clock, he came into the house in a state that looked like fierce intoxication. Such a state in him, I knew, was impossible.” Brown helped the feverish Keats to bed, “and I heard him say,—‘That is blood from my mouth… Bring me the candle Brown; and let me see this blood.’ After regarding it stead-fastly, he looked up in my face, with a calmness of countenance that I can never forget, and said,—‘I know the colour of that blood;—it is arterial blood;—I cannot be deceived in that colour;—that drop of blood is my death warrant;—and I must die.’” He would live little more than one year.

Despite some remissions in the spring, he continued to hemorrhage in June and July. His friends were shaken, but in those days there was no certain way to diagnose tuberculosis or to gauge its severity, and there were hopes for his recovery. In the early summer he lived alone in Kentish Town (Brown had rented out Wentworth Place), where the Hunts, nearby, could look in on him. But living alone, fearful and restless, trying to separate himself from Fanny Brawne because of the pain thoughts of her caused him, he became more ill and agitated. The Hunts took him in, as they had years before at the beginning. He often walked past Well Walk, his last home with his brothers; once, Hunt remembered, he wept “and told me he was ‘dying of a broken heart.’” He thought bitterly about the disappointments of his brothers, writing to Brown in November, “O, that something fortunate had ever happened to me or my brothers!—then I might hope,—but despair is forced upon me as a habit.” He soon left the Hunts’ after a quarrel and tried to return to the house in Well Walk. But he was taken in, desperately ill, by Fanny and Mrs. Brawne, and he spent his last month in England being nursed in their home. He was advised to spend the winter in Italy. In August, Shelley—who would write his beautiful elegy Adonais for Keats and who himself would die in 1822, drowned in the Gulf of Spezia with a copy of Keats’s 1820 poems in his pocket—invited him to stay with him in Pisa. He declined, but hoped to meet Shelley after a stay in Rome.

Keats left for Rome in November 1820, accompanied by Joseph Severn, the devoted young painter who, alone in a strange country, nursed Keats and managed his affairs daily until his death. They took pleasant rooms on the Piazza di Spagna, and for a while Keats took walks and rode out on a small horse. He tried to keep his friend’s spirits up, and it is characteristic of the man that he was always concerned for poor Severn. In his last weeks he suffered terribly and hoped for the peace of death. He was in too much pain to look at letters, especially from Fanny Brawne, believing that frustrated love contributed to his ill health. He asked Severn to bury her letters with him (it is not clear he did). Yet he thought always of his friends and brothers. His last known letter, 30 November 1820, asks Brown to write to his brother, and “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 .”

On the night of 23 February 1821, Keats died, peacefully, in Severn’s arms. His last words were to comfort Severn: “Severn—lift me up—I am dying—I shall die easy—don’t be frightened—be firm, and thank God it has come!” He was buried in the Protestant Cemetery. He had requested that the stone bear no name, only the words “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” Severn and Charles Brown honored his wishes but added these words above Keats’s own epitaph: “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.” Brown later regretted the addition.

Keats’s dying fears of persecution and eternal obscurity were proved wrong in the generations to come. Even in 1820 and 1821 there were a few positive notices, such as the influential Francis Jeffrey’s approving, if belated, essay in the Edinburgh Review , and the obituary in the London Magazine (April 1921), which noted, “There is but a small portion of the public acquainted with the writings of this young man, yet they were full of high imagination and delicate fancy.” His friends, particularly Hunt and Brown, continued to collect materials and publish memoirs. In 1828 Hunt wrote the first of his several biographical sketches, in his Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries . The most complete offering yet of Keats’s poetry, The Poetical Works of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats (1829), published in Paris and Philadelphia, contains a long memoir drawn from Hunt’s.

But most important to establishing Keats’s reputation was the biography produced in 1848 by Richard Monckton Milnes, Lord Houghton, a minor poet and essayist known and admired in literary circles of the 1840s and 1850s. Brown, Severn, Clarke, Reynolds, and others all contributed to his Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats , which, whatever its flaws as a reliable scholarly biography, was widely read and respected. Keats was thought of as a poet whose talent, though its development was cut short, was the equal of Shelley’s and Byron ‘s.

By 1853 Matthew Arnold could speak of Keats as “in the school of Shakespeare,” and, despite his weak sense of dramatic action and his overly lush imagery was “one whose exquisite genius and pathetic death render him forever interesting.” Yet it was just this quality of lush, “pictorial” imagery that Victorians admired in Keats, as reflected in popular paintings from his works by Pre-Raphaelites such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and poets such as Alfred Tennyson and Algernon Charles Swinburne , who wrote of Keats’s mastery of visual detail, his “instinct for the absolute expression of absolute natural beauty.” Fascination with the sensuous surface of his verse and a sentimental belief that Keats was a subjective lyricist of sensitive feeling contributed to the Victorians’ admiration of his poetry. Indeed, in 1857, Alexander Smith, in the Encyclopædia Britannica (eighth edition) entry on Keats, could proclaim, with some exaggeration, that “With but one or two exceptions, no poet of the last generation stands at this moment higher in the popular estimation, and certainly no one has in a greater degree influenced the poetic development of the last thirty years.”

Keats brought out the warmest feelings in those who knew him, and that included people with a remarkable range of characters, beliefs, and tastes. One can say without sentimentality or exaggeration that no one who ever met Keats did not admire him, and none ever said a bad—or even unkind—word of him. His close friends, such as Brown, Clarke, and Severn, remained passionately devoted to his memory all their lives. “On his deathbed in great emotion at his cruel destiny he told me that his greatest pleasure had been the watching the growth of flowers,” Severn remembered, more than twenty years later. “There was a strong bias of the beautiful side of humanity in every thing he did.”

“I have lov’d the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remembered,” Keats wrote to Fanny Brawne in February 1820, just after he became ill. In Keats’s work the struggle with aesthetic form becomes an image of a struggle for meaning against the limits of experience. His art’s very form seems to embody and interpret the conflicts of mortality and desire. The urgency of this poetry has always appeared greater to his readers for his intense love of beauty and his tragically short life. Keats approached the relations among experience, imagination, art, and illusion with penetrating thoughtfulness, with neither sentimentality nor cynicism but with a delight in the ways in which beauty, in its own subtle and often surprising ways, reveals the truth.

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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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(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.

Only with the help of his friends, who pushed hard to secure Keats' legacy, and the work and style of Alfred, Lord Tennyson , the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom during the latter half of the 19th century, did Keats' stock rise considerably.

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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Poet Biographies

The Tragic Life of John Keats

John Keats was an 18th-century Romantic poet. Despite his short career, his works are considered some of the greatest in English literature. Keats tragically died of tuberculosis at age 25, but his legacy lives on as a significant figure in literary history.

John Keats was born in October 1795 in Moorgate, London, England. Although he only lived to be twenty-five years old, his poetry has inspired countless poets whose names are known and those whose names are lost to time.

Keats’ poems , such as  ‘ Ode on a Grecian Urn ,’ ‘ Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art ,’  and  ‘ Ode to A Nightingale, ‘  are studied around the world. Despite his short life and career, Keats’s poetry had a significant impact on the Romantic movement. His use of vivid imagery , rich language, and explored poignant themes such as mortality and beauty have left a legacy.

About John Keats

• 1 Life Facts
• 2 Interesting Facts
• 3 Famous Poems
• 4 Early Life
• 5 Education
• 6 Literary Career
• 7 Writing Career and Relationships
• 9 Influence from other Poets
• John Keats was born in October 1795 in Moorgate, London, England.
• His first published work, ‘ O Solitude! ‘ appeared in 1816.
• He was a contemporary of Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Wordsworth.
• In 1819, he contracted tuberculosis.
• He died in February of 1821 at only twenty-five years old.

Interesting Facts

• Keats was just over five feet tall.
• His love affair with Fanny Brawne was a defining feature in his life.
• At one point, he decided to become a surgeon, something he had no genuine interest in.
• While a young student, he often got into fights at school.
• Keats disliked his early poetry so much that he burned his papers.

Famous Poems

• ‘ Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art’ is most certainly one of Keats’ best-known sonnets . It comes from the perspective of one person who is seeking out the company of another for the rest of the time. Keats uses star-related images in order to depict a feeling of solitude but also strength and steadfastness.
• ‘ O Solitude if I must with thee dwell ‘   is another of his famous sonnets. In this short poem, the speaker discusses the power nature has and how he is tempted to disappear within it. Solitude, this speaker has decided, will be his constant companion for the rest of time. He might as well accept it.
• ‘ La Belle Dame sans Merci ‘   is a longer poem, one that tells the story of a knight who is seduced by a fairy-like woman.  The knight has a chaotic experience in this poem that concludes when he wakes up  cold, alone, and disappointed.  The poet does not reveal whether or not this experience was a dream or something more. 
• ‘ Ode on a Grecian Urn’   is one of several “ ode ” poems that Keats wrote. This one is dedicated to a Greek urn or vase. It’s fairly complicated in its use of language, something that helps to depict the speaker’s own investigation into the images on the urn. He is not entirely sure what he sees there. Keats speaks on some of his favorite topics throughout this piece, art, and beauty, as well as truth and knowledge.
• ‘ Ode to a Nightingale ‘ is  a very well-known poem that depicts a speaker listening to a nightingale sing and feeling jealousy over its beautiful and free life. He considers life, death, and what it would mean to go into the woods and never come back. This is another example of a Keats poem in which there is confusion between what is real and what is a dream or fantasy .

Explore more John Keats poems .

John Keats was born in October 1795 in Moorgate, London, England. His exact birthplace is somewhat contentious, but Keats believed he was born at an Inn that was attached to the stables which his father managed. He was the oldest of four children and lost his parents when he was very young. Prior to the death of his parents, in 1803, Keats was sent to John Clarke’s school in Enfield. It was a liberal-leaning school and promoted a more modern educational agenda than larger, more renowned schools such as Eton and Harrow.

At John Clarke’s school, Keats developed an interest in classics; this passion would stay with him for the rest of his life and inform his future writing. He was initially an unruly student, prone to fighting, but he eventually turned himself around to focus on his studies. Keats befriended the son of the headmaster, Charles Cowden Clarke, who later went on to speak very highly of Keats.

It was in 1804 when Keats’ father, Thomas, was trampled by a horse. Keats was only eight years old at the time. His father had worked as a stable keeper and died during the return journey after a visit to Keats and one of his brothers. His death greatly impacted Keats’ understanding of life and death and would create a basis for all of the poetry that was to come. After her husband’s death, Keats’ mother, Frances, remarried. That marriage soon fell apart, and she left her family to the care of her mother. She died in 1810 of tuberculosis when Keats was 14. 

It is said that much of Keats’ financial woes in later life came from the mishandling of his father’s inheritance. After his mother’s death, John’s grandmother entrusted tea merchant Richard Abbey with their inheritance in order to try and create some financial stability. However, this decision seemed to backfire, as Abbey turned out to be overbearing when it came to financial matters and wouldn’t give the money to the children freely. Richard Abbey and John Rowland Sandell were given the role of guardians to the Keats children.

After the death of both his parents, Keats delved into his passion for art and writing. Keats was forced to leave his studies at Clarke School to study medicine at a hospital in London as an apprentice. When Keats finished his initial apprenticeship with Thomas Hammond in Enfield, Edmonton, he resisted as a student at Guy’s Hospital, where he began studying in 1815. He became a licensed apothecary in 1816.

While Keats may have intended, at this point in his life, to commit to a career as a surgeon, the increasingly long hours required by the hospital cut sharply into his writing time. He was never quite as interested in medicine as he was in writing. This  contrast  sent Keats into a depression. He feared for his future career and happiness. By the end of 1816, he had made his final decision to become a poet, although he continued his medical studies.

A thing of beauty is a joy forever. John Keats

Literary Career

In May of 1816, Keats’ first published work, ‘ O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell ,’  was published in  The Examiner.  This was followed by ‘ To My Brothers ‘ and Keats’ volume of poetry titled  Poems.  His  verse  was strongly influent by those around him, especially Leigh Hunt. The book was far from a success, so much so that his publishers were embarrassed by it.

During his time, Keats was not actually considered a Romantic poet like he is today among his peers. He actually received a lot of pushback from reviewers at the time. One example is John Gibson Lockhart, who referred to Keats as a ‘vulgar Cockney poetaster.’

Despite the bad reviews, in Blackwood’s Magazine, of his first volume, Keats’ career continued. He was introduced to a number of different writers, editors, and artists of all kinds. He became known in the London literary scene, alongside poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Wordsworth . In the final month of 1816, Keats finally quit medical school and moved in with his brothers in Hampstead.

In 1818, during the summer, Keats embarked on a walking tour of Northern England, the Lake District, and Scotland along with good friend Charles Brown. The intense exposure to the elements first pushed Keats towards tuberculosis. When he finally returned to London, he was met with more negative reviews regarding his poetry. A number of publications decried his  epic poem ,  ‘Endymion,’   as “driveling idiocy.”

Writing Career and Relationships

Keats’ life was met with more  tragedy  as his brother Tom died of tuberculosis in late 1818. His life was not all bad, though, as at this same time, he met and fell in love with a woman named Fanny Brawne. Their relationship was tragically short, but she would have a remarkable impact on his work. They became engaged in 1819 after Brawne and her mother moved in next door to Keats at Wentworth Place, Hampstead, which is now the Keats House and Museum. This same year is considered to be his most successful. Keats wrote several of his best-known poems, including  ‘ The Eve of St. Agnes .‘

Throughout his short life, Keats only published three volumes of poetry and was read by only a very small number of people. In 1819 he contracted tuberculosis and left for Rome, Italy, where he suffered in agony, partially due to  absurd  medical treatments, until his death in February of 1821 at only twenty-five years old. He was buried in a Protestant cemetery.

Influence from other Poets

John Keats was notably influenced by writers such as Percy Bysshe Shelley, Edmund Spenser , William Shakespeare , John Milton , and Virgil.

John Keats is most famous for his impact on the literary world, particularly poetry, during the 19th century. He was a prodigy of sorts, releasing iconic works at a young age. His most famous works include ‘ Ode on a Grecian Urn ‘ and ‘ Ode to a Nightingale .’ His Romantic style has great sensuous appeal as he uses strong imagery to create emotion in the reader.

Due to external factors, such as his early death, John Keats never ended up getting married. Until his death in 1821, Keats was heavily focused on his craft, creating some of the greatest poetry from the 19th century, which distracted him from marriage. He was engaged to Fanny Brawne and had a serious relationship with Isabella Jones but never got around to tying the knot.

John Keats’ poetry was ingrained in the movement of Romanticism , focusing on beauty, nature, and the human experience. However, unlike some of his peers, such as Percy Bysshe Shelley, Keats would focus on objects of tangibility, whereas a poet like Shelly focused on intangible things.

The tale of John Keats’ life was one of tragedy , as he died very young. Unfortunately, the poet, with a successful future ahead of him, was struck by Tuberculosis in 1821. He was only 25 at the time of his death.

Many scholars and poetry lovers consider ‘ Ode on a Grecian Urn ,’ released in 1819, to be Johns Keats’ masterpiece or crowning glory. It is a romantic poem talking about the themes of mortality, nature, and time.

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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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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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A Short Biography of John Keats

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

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The Romantic Reputation of John Keats

On his death two centuries ago, Keats and his work looked sure to be forgotten. Why is he now so well loved?

Two hundred years ago, on 23 February 1821, John Keats died. He had suffered from tuberculosis since early 1820 and, after months of distress and pain, finally succumbed to the disease at the age of just 25. Keats was a failed medical student, who had swapped operations for odes after realising his poetic talent. He had been writing for six years and publishing his poetry for four. Contrary to popular belief, Keats was not considered a renowned poet during his lifetime. His verses were vilified in the press and his works had failed to sell. 

After his death in Rome, Keats’ belongings were burned to prevent the spread of infection and his body speedily interred in the city’s Protestant Cemetery. All that was left of the poet were his words and the memories held dear by those he left behind. Keats himself believed his poetical efforts were for nothing. He wrote in a February 1820 letter to his fiancée Fanny Brawne: ‘I have left no immortal work behind me – nothing to make my friends proud of my memory.’ With his untimely death, it seemed probable that Keats would fade into obscurity, like many of the poets of the Romantic period who are now largely forgotten. He did not, however, and his name lives on. This was due to the efforts made by his friends, associates and admirers after his death. Many of their names are as well known as his own, while others languish in relative obscurity. 

The first of Keats’ admirers who assisted in the recuperation of his reputation was his fellow poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley. The two men had known each other in London and upon hearing of Keats’ illness Shelley invited him to Pisa to recover. Keats never made it that far. Like many, Shelley believed that negative reviews of Keats’ work had led to his death and Shelley himself was so affected by it that he wrote the elegy Adonais in Keats’ memory: ‘I weep for Adonais – he is dead!’ The connection between the two men was made even clearer after Shelley’s drowning in July 1822. His body was washed ashore after ten days and partly identified through the copy of Keats’ poems found in his pocket. The two poets’ early deaths – both in Italy – and the burial of Shelley also in Rome’s Protestant Cemetery further entwined their legacies. 

Interest in Keats appeared to go hand-in-hand with that of Shelley: as Shelley’s Adonais increased in popularity, readers were also intrigued by the poem’s subject. 

The critic and essayist Leigh Hunt is notable as the first to introduce Keats and Shelley to one another and to the reading public, through his liberal paper, the  Examiner. Hunt, a fascinating radical figure in his own right, was a key influence on Keats, encouraging him during his life and promoting his work after his death. His 1828 Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries included the first biographical account of Keats. In it he described Keats as:

A man of genius … one of those who are too genuine and too original to be properly appreciated at first, but whose time for applause will infallibly arrive.  

Although only a short piece, Leigh Hunt’s chapter on Keats contained snapshots of his life, as well as some of his shorter poems. 

Oddly, there was never a full-length biography of Keats written by anyone who knew him. The closest thing Keats had to a biographer was his friend, Charles Armitage Brown, who accompanied the poet to Scotland. He was his sometime collaborator and nursed him during his illness. Although Brown planned to write a biography, he never completed it. Before his emigration to New Zealand in 1841, he passed all his Keats manuscripts to Richard Monckton Milnes, later Baron Broughton. It was Milnes who eventually wrote the first biography, or as he called it, ‘a signal monument of the worth and genius of Keats’, in 1848, which included many of the poems published for the first time. 

Boosted by Milnes’ biography, Keats’ poetic reputation flourished in the Victorian era. Many key literary figures were influenced by him, including Robert Browning, who in 1825 was reportedly given original copies of Keats’ poetry; Browning’s wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who referred to Keats in her 1857 poem Aurora Leigh (‘By Keats’s soul, the man who never stepped / In gradual progress like another man’); and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, whose poetry is often recognised as a homage to Keats’ style.

The art world was also inspired by Keats’ words – particularly the rebellious Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, who saw their ideals reflected in his poems. John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt were so enamoured with Keats’ poetry that the subjects of many of their paintings were taken from them. This included Millais’  Lorenzo and Isabella and both artists’ depictions of The Eve of St Agnes . 

Through his poetry and paintings influenced by them, Keats’ was popularised for a Victorian audience. 

His legacy would become more solid in the early 20th century, as museums were dedicated to his memory in London and Rome: the Keats-Shelley House in Rome in 1906 and Wentworth Place in London, which became the Keats Memorial House in 1925. 

When Keats’ letters to Fanny Brawne were published in 1887 they caused a sensation with their passionate content: ‘I could be martyr’d for my Religion – Love is my religion.’ The publication in 1936 of letters from Brawne to Keats’ younger sister also renewed interest in his life and poetry and ensured that later critics recognised Brawne was worthy of Keats’ love.

Since the 1930s Keats has continued to epitomise our ideal of the Romantic poet, with his beautiful verses, tragic life and early death. His writings are beloved by generations and his life continues to be scrutinised in the 21st century perhaps to a greater extent than ever before. Despite believing that he had ‘left nothing to make [his] friends proud of [his] memory’, it is ultimately owing to the work of those very friends and fans that his memory did live on. Thanks to them, on the bicentenary of his death, Keats is still read, studied and remembered.

Amy Wilcockson is a PhD researcher at the University of Nottingham and Keats-Shelley Association of America Communications Fellow 2020-21. 

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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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British Literature Wiki

Keats’s Letters

Keats’s Poetry

Keats’s Odes

John Keats’ Childhood Struggles: Born to Thomas and Frances Jennings Keats, John Keats was the eldest of 5 sibilings. Tragedy struck their family early on, when his brother, Edward, passed away at age 1 in 1802 (Colvin). Keats suffered a lifestyle filled with multiple inconsistent caretakers. His father, Thomas Keats, died in April of 1804 in a horse riding accident and leaving Keats and his siblings under the sole care of his mother, Frances Jennings (“John Keats”). Slightly over two months later, she got remarried to a minor bank clerk named William Rawlings. However, overly consumed with his desire to become rich, Rawlings proved to be a poor husband and father figure as the marriage ended in disaster John Keats: Chronology). Keats and his siblings were then sent to live with Jennings’ mother. After the death of Keats’ mother in 1810 and his grandmother in 1814, a merchant named Richard Abbey became his primary caretaker (Smith). Abbey strongly disregarded the interests and welfare of the Keats children as he often kept their family’s money from them. Despite Keats’ interest in poetry, Abbey forced him into an apprenticeship with a surgeon in order to learn to become a doctor.

Early Education: John Keats achieved literary success from a young age. Keats was receiving his education from Enfield academy when he became very close with the headmaster, John Clarke, and his 15 year old son, Charles Cowden Clarke. He earned the headmaster’s approval by winning multiple essay contests and by demonstrating his skill in Latin and French (“John Keats”). Clarke’s school is where Keats began to study literature extensively. Keats was very in touch with his imagination at this time. Inspired by the tragic death of his father, Keats read and studied literature substantially. His love for reading and writing also fueled his vigorous studies.

The Cause of the Keats Family’s Financial Troubles: One year after the death of Keats’ father, Keats lost his grandfather, John Jennings, to old age. John was a kind and generous man but was also prone to be taken advantage of. He unknowingly hired a con-artist to take care of his will which resulted in disastrous consequences for the Keats family. The man wrote John Jenning’s will in a way which was very vague and difficult to understand. Therefore after his death, there were disputes over where his fortune be distributed. The family ended up losing a significant portion of their wealth ensuring financial troubles for many years to come. Citation?

Medical Career and Transition to Poetry: Keat’s medical career began after he left Enfield academy, when his guardian Richard Abbey forced him into an apprenticeship under a prestigious surgeon, Thomas Hammond. His job as a “dresser” at Guy’s Hospital, entailed him to complete tasks such as holding back patients during surgery and bandaging their injuries and wounds. Although the position of surgeon would have led to a respectable salary, and would not have required him to attain a college degree, witnessing such graphic human suffering proved to be too traumatic for Keats. During his time as a “dresser”, he became very depressed, and was also unable to devote much time to writing (Chenault and Carlson). He did go on to earn the the Licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries (Smith), but after the 5 year apprenticeship he decided to leave the medical field and pursue his literary talents (Barnard 7). During this time, Keats became acquainted with poet Leigh Hunt, who convinced him he could survive without his surgeon salaries, and focus solely on his poetry (“John Keats”). In March of 1816, Keats published his first volume of poetry, titled Poems , although it did not receive favorable reviews (Colvin). This did not stop Hunt from publishing Keats’s work, such as “ On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” a sonnet about his reaction to George Chapman’s translation of Homer. Although Keats achieved some literary success at the start of his career, the years of 1818 and 1819 boasted his most accomplished works, specifically his series of odes, such as Ode to a Grecian Urn and Ode to a Nightingale . His release of “Endymion” in 1818 did not yield as favorable of reviews, with many critics implying that he should return to his career as a surgeon (Chenault and Carlson). Keats continued to write, despite the harsh criticism, and the final volume of poems he lived to see published was Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems in 1820 . It attained favorable responses from many of his peers, but by this time Keats was growing progressively ill, and was more consumed with his declining health (“John Keats”).

Romantic Relationship with Fanny Brawne: It is speculated that Keats met his longtime lover, Fanny Brawne, in 1818 when he moved into Wentworth Place (now known as Keats House). Much of the elaborate details regarding their relationship remain a mystery, largely because he burned the majority of her letters, only preserving a few of her final letters, which he had buried with him. From the writings of Keats and Brawne that have been salvaged, it is apparent that their love affair was tumultuous, due to his struggle with tuberculosis, and concern with attaining success in the literary field. In a letter Keats wrote to Brawne in 1818, he expresses how his approaching demise and his deep love for Brawne are the main focus of his thoughts, “I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your Loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute.” (Keats, Scudder, and Forman 384-385). Other examples of his adoration for Brawne can be found in his poem “Bright Star,” which he wrote in 1819. The last time the couple saw each other was before Keats departed for Rome to seek medical treatment.

contributors: Alteri, Ginsburg, McGraw, Rodino, and Cooper

Timeline of Literary Works Here is a listing of Keats’s poems and letters. You can click on any of the titles to read the full text.

References:

Images: http://library.thinkquest.org/06aug/01107/johnkeats.jpg http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/features/keats/keats.html#portrait

Biographical Information:

Barnard, John. John Keats. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Print.

Chenault, Libby, and Katherine Carlson. “Presenting John Keats: A Celebration of Six Million Volumes.” The Life and Legacy of John Keats. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, March 2009. Web. 16 May 2012. < __http://www.lib.unc.edu/rbc/keats/the-life-and-legacy-of-john-keats.php__ >.

Colvin, Sidney. “Birth And Parentage: Schooldays And Apprenticeship.” John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics and After-Fame. http://englishhistory.net/keats/colvinkeats1.html

“John Keats.” Poetry Foundation. Web. 16 May 2012. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/john-keats .

“John Keats: Chronology.” http://englishhistory.net/keats/chronology.html . English History, n.d. Web. 16 May 2012. < http://englishhistory.net/keats/chronology.html >.

Keats, John, Horace Elisha Scudder, and Harry Buxton Forman. The complete poetical works of John Keats. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007. 384-385. eBook.

The Life and Works of John Keats

The bicentenary of Keats’s most productive years as a poet, and the period when he found inspiration, friendship and love, is an exciting opportunity to (re)discover and enjoy his works as well as engage with poetry and its ongoing relevance to us all today.

By City of London Corporation

This online exhibition has been created by Keats House, Hampstead for the #Keats200 bicentenary programme.

"Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!" (2021) by Elaine Duigenan Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

Introducing John Keats

John Keats was born and baptised in the City of London in 1795.  After education in Enfield and an apprenticeship in Edmonton, he trained to be a doctor at Guy’s Hospital before giving up a career in medicine to become a poet.

A thing of beauty is a joy forever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

From 'Endymion: A Poetic Romance', 1817

Keats House, Hampstead (2015) by Keats House Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

Keats moved to Hampstead, then a village outside of London, in 1817 and lived at Wentworth Place (now Keats House) from December 1818 to September 1820. While living there he mixed with a circle of friends who nurtured him and his work, met and fell in love with Fanny Brawne, and wrote most of the work for which he is now famous. After falling ill with consumption, he left England to go to Italy for his health but died there on 23 February 1821 at the age of just 25.

His gravestone in Rome bears the words ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water’, as he believed he had not achieved literary fame in his lifetime. Two hundred years later however, Keats is one of the best-known English Romantic poets and the works he wrote in the spring and summer of 1819 in particular, are still republished, studied, read and loved around the world.    Whether you already love his work or are new to Keats and his writing, we hope you find his genius and legacy living on through this exhibition.

John Clarke’s school, Enfield (About 1900) by E.G. Hill Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

John Keats was born in Moorgate, right on the edge of the expanding city of London. His father worked at an inn and his mother was the inn keeper’s daughter. John was the eldest child, followed by brothers George, Tom, and Edward (who died young), and finally a sister called Frances.       

Mapping John Keats's Life (2121) by Keats House Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

While the family weren’t wealthy, they could afford to send their sons to a good school. They chose John Clarke’s School in Enfield, which awarded prizes for good work instead of punishing children. This more liberal education encouraged Keats to change from a boy known for fighting to one who loved literature and poetry.  When he was eight, his father died in a riding accident while returning from visiting him at school. Within months his mother remarried, leaving her children with their grandparents. She returned five years later suffering from consumption, a common and fatal illness. Keats nursed his mother and began to study hard, believing this could help her. She died soon after leaving them as orphans.

The Keats children were given legal guardians by their grandmother but they were unable to access their inheritance. At the age of 14, Keats left school to train in medicine.  

Keats's cottage next to Thomas Hammond's house' (1925) by H. Cutner Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

Medical Training

Keats left school aged 14 to begin a career in medicine. He was apprenticed to Dr Thomas Hammond in Edmonton, who taught Keats to diagnose illnesses, prepare remedies and perform minor surgery.  

Two pages from John Keats’s medical notebook (1815) by John Keats Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

At the end of his apprenticeship, Keats returned to London to continue his medical training at Guy’s Hospital. Keats was a good student and was awarded the prestigious role of surgeon’s dresser, which involved assisting at amputations and dressing wounds. Witnessing operations performed before anaesthetics and antibiotics influenced his later writing on human suffering.

He passed his medical exams in 1816 at the age of 20, but was becoming increasingly drawn to a career as a poet. While studying at Guy’s he met the influential journalist Leigh Hunt, who was to become a great friend of Keats, and champion of his poetry. Keats’s first published  poem, ‘To Solitude’ appeared in Hunt’s journal The Examiner in May 1816, two months before passing his medical exams.       By the end of 1816 Keats could no longer balance both his work at the hospital and his writing. He chose poetry. While his guardians were appalled, Keats began to find support in a new circle of writers, artists and journalists living in Hampstead.   

O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell, Let it not be among the jumbled heap Of murky buildings; climb with me the steep, – Nature’s observatory – whence the dell, Its flowery slopes, its river’s crystal swell, May seem a span; let me thy vigils keep ’Mongst boughs pavillion’d, where the deer’s swift leap Startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell. But though I’ll gladly trace these scenes with thee, Yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind, Whose words are images of thoughts refin’d, Is my soul’s pleasure; and it sure must be Almost the highest bliss of human-kind, When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee.

‘To Solitude’, 1816

A view of the Vale of Health, Hampstead Heath (About 1800) by Francis John Sarjent Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

Wentworth Place, Hampstead

The Keats brothers, John, George and Tom, moved from Southwark to Hampstead in 1817, initially to benefit from its healthier environment. Situated eight miles outside London, it was then a small village, or more accurately, villages, on the edge of the Heath, which was already a popular leisure destination for Londoners. Keats was also attracted by the literary people who lived there, including Leigh Hunt who was living in the Vale of Health at that time.    

"Keats's Corner" Well Walk' (About 1875) by Frederick Cook Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

On 1 December 1818, John Keats’s brother Tom died of consumption at their lodgings in Well Walk, Hampstead.  John walked to Wentworth Place to tell his friends the Dilke family and Charles Brown the news and was invited by Brown to come and live with him at the house.  

‘Wentworth Place, Ham[p]stead’ (About 1890) by Fred Holland Day Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

Keats lived at Wentworth Place on and off until September 1820.  During this period, and inspired by his reading and surroundings, he produced many of the works for which he is now famous. He also found friendship with a creative, literary circle who championed his writing and encouraged him to work. Most significantly, while living in Hampstead he met and fell in love with Fanny Brawne, who lived at the house from April 1819 to December 1831.

Portrait miniature of Fanny Brawne (About 1833) by Anonymous Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

Fanny Brawne

In April 1819, the Dilke family moved out of Wentworth Place and rented their side of the house to Mrs Brawne and her three children, including the eldest daughter Fanny.

Engagement ring given to Fanny Brawne by John Keats (Late 18th, early 19th century?) Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

Fanny Brawne and Keats first met some time in late 1818. The Brawne family had rented Brown’s home for the summer while Keats and Brown were walking in Scotland. On Brown’s return, the family took another house nearby in Hampstead and continued to visit their friends at Wentworth Place.  After she moved back to Wentworth Place, and now separated only by a wall, the two fell deeply in love. It is not known when they exchanged rings, but we do know that Keats wrote 39 love letters to her between April 1819 and September 1820. 

The spring and summer of 1819 was a remarkably productive period in Keats’s life, inspired in large part by his love for Fanny Brawne. Even after he became seriously ill from February 1820, he continued to write letters to her despite being told by his doctors not to read or write poetry, in case it distressed him.

Fanny Brawne saw Keats for the last time on 13 September 1820, when he left for Rome. She continued to live in the house until a few years after her mother’s death in 1829.

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art – Not in lone splendor 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 swell and fall, Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever – or else swoon to death.

‘Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art’, 1819

Keats’s Parlour (2015) by Keats House Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

The Poems of 1819

Keats wrote some of the finest poems in the English language in one phenomenally creative period from September 1818 to September 1819.  He was just 23. 

John Keats' (1819) by Charles Brown Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

Despite being hampered by family tragedy, continued money worries and literary criticism, Keats began and revised his epic poem ‘Hyperion’, composed two long narrative poems, sonnets, a ballad, a play and six exceptional odes.

Inspired by the loss of his brother Tom and the beauty, friendship and love he found in Hampstead, his poems of that year are both sad and uplifting at the same time, beautifully demonstrating how sorrow and happiness exist together. He was skilled enough to write about different subjects in different types of verse, yet his poems all show his love of nature and his belief in how powerful the human imagination is.  He seems to say that though everything in life fades, we still have beauty, an idea he represented in his poems through a malicious maiden or the melodic song of a nightingale.

‘Keats Listening to the Nightingale on Hampstead Heath’ (1849) by Joseph Severn Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

Critical Responses

Most of the poems Keats wrote between 1817 and 1819 were criticised by the conservative, literary establishment of the day. 

As a follower of Leigh Hunt, he was mockingly referred to as a ‘Cockney poet’, with the Tory paper the ‘Quarterly’ calling him

‘more unintelligible,… twice as diffuse and ten times more tiresome and absurd than his prototype’.

Keats only published three books of poetry during his lifetime. The publication of his first book, ‘Poems’ in 1817, mostly went unnoticed while reviews of ‘Endymion’ the following year, attacked both the poem itself and Keats personally. One critic questioned whether someone of his background should write about classical subjects and suggested that he should abandon all hope of being a poet.

The critical response to his last book , ‘Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems’ published in 1820, was more positive. The respected ‘Edinburgh Review’ praised the collection’s imaginative power and beauty of expression and Charles Lamb writing in the ‘New Times’, compared Keats favourably to Dante, Chaucer and Spenser.

The ‘Lamia’ volume contains many of the poems written during 1819 and is now seen as one of the strongest collections of poetry ever published. Sadly, Keats never knew the pleasure the poetry in this volume would later bring to so many people. The reviews at the time were not positive enough to make his work widely popular and fully understood by the public, and worsening symptoms of consumption meant that Keats wrote no more poetry after 1820.

Tuberculous lungs (1830s) by Robert Carswell Original Source: https://www.wellcomecollection.org

Keats and Consumption

In February 1820 Keats realised he had consumption, now known as tuberculosis or simply TB. There was no known cause, though many believed it was hereditary and that sensitive or creative people were more likely to be affected.  

‘The Maria Crowther, Sailing Brig’ (1820) by Joseph Severn Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

Keats probably contracted the illness in 1818 while nursing his brother Tom, but the disease lay dormant throughout 1819 allowing time for his most creative and brilliant writing. However, from February 1820 his health deteriorated, destroying his hopes for literary success. Keats was initially prescribed rest, a starvation diet and bloodletting, but this only made him weaker. He was also told to stop reading or writing poetry in case it over excited him. 

 As was common practice, Keats was advised to go abroad where a warmer climate could relieve his symptoms. On 17 September 1820, Keats sailed on the Maria Crowther to Italy where he intended to stay the winter. Joseph Severn, a friend and painter, accompanied Keats on his journey.

The ship made slow progress along the English Channel and the passengers had to endure being seasick as well as a violent storm. In the Mediterranean Keats suffered another haemorrhage, followed by a fever. On 21 October they finally arrived in the Bay of Naples but were forced to quarantine on board for two weeks before they could disembark. More than six weeks after leaving London they finally set foot in Italy on 31 October 1820. It was Keats’s 25th birthday. 

John Keats on his death-bed (1939) by Emery Walker after Joseph Severn Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

Death and Legacy

Keats died in Rome on 23 February 1821 aged just 25. He was buried four days later and the words ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water’ were later inscribed on his gravestone, as he believed he had failed in his ambition to be a great poet.

Keats published just three books of poetry in his lifetime but was also a prolific writer of letters, many of which survived providing a glimpse into the life and character of both him and the society he lived within.

When Keats died his writing was not well known beyond his circle of friends. It was through their love and dedication that many of his manuscripts survived.

I shall soon be laid in the quiet grave... O! I can feel the cold earth upon me - the daisies growing over me - O for this quiet - it will be my first -

Keats quoted in a letter from Joseph Severn to John Taylor, 6 March 1821.

After the first biography of Keats was published in 1848, the Pre-Raphaelite painters began to take an interest in his work. Keats’s sensuous imagery inspired them to paint scenes from his poems, bringing them to a wider audience.

By the 1880s Keats’s poetry was becoming increasingly popular and enthusiasts wanted to find his Hampstead home. A dedication plaque was added above the front door in 1896. When the house was threatened with demolition in 1920, the Keats Memorial House Fund raised enough money to save it. It opened to the public on 9 May 1925 and, today, Keats House is provided by the City of London Corporation as part of its contribution to the cultural life of London and the nation.

Despite changing tastes in literature over the last 200 years, Keats’s poetry is still fresh and meaningful. His life was short, yet he created some of the most enduring poems in the English language. We now celebrate him as one of the world’s finest poets.

From ‘Endymion: A Poetic Romance’, 1817

Keats's Desk (2015) by Keats House Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

We hope you enjoyed this exploration of John Keats's life.

If you'd like to learn more, visit Our City Together , where you will find in-depth articles covering specific periods in Keats's life, his letters, poetry and friends. 

Introducing Keats200

The Keats200 bicentenary is a celebration of Keats’s life, works and legacy, beginning in December 2018 through to February 2021 and beyond. It is led by three major partners – Keats House, Hampstead, The Keats Foundation and the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association – and is open to all individuals and organisations who have an interest in Keats or poetry.

One Keats200 project has been with photographer and artist, Elaine Duigenan. As Artist in Residence during 2020, Elaine has been inspired by the garden and collections at Keats House, Hampstead. She has created new artworks drawing on themes associated with Keats’s life and works. Two of these are featured in this display and Keats House would like to thank Elaine for permission to use these beautiful works of art to help engage us with the events of 200 years ago.

Today, Keats House is managed by the City of London Corporation and is a registered charity (1053381).

The Wren Window

City of london corporation, the defeat of the floating batteries at gibraltar, women of guildhall art gallery, the woodman’s daughter, marie duval's cartoons, suffragette bombings, a sonata of beethoven, billingsgate roman house and baths, places in the city of london connected to the slave trade.

Love and Tragedy

Writing career, john keats’s works, john keats’s impact on future literature, john keats’s famous quotes, related posts:, post navigation.

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John Keats: Biography, Famous Poems & Other Notable Achievements

by World History Edu · September 28, 2022

John Keats may not have garnered any awards or won any significant acclaim during his lifetime, but he earned a posthumous recognition as one of the most skillful English Romantic poets. Over the course of his very brief career, he wrote tens of poems, including sonnets. Despite the fact that Keats’ life was short-lived, his impact on English literature was definitely not.

John Keats – Famous Works and Achievements. Image: Posthumous portrait of John Keats by British painter William Hilton, National Portrait Gallery, London (c. 1822)

Birth and Family

The oldest of four children, Keats was born in London in 1795. When he was still young, he lost his father in a riding accident. In 1803, Keats was put in Clarke’s school in Enfield which was only a short distance from his grandparents’ home.

At school, he loved literature, history and classical studies and was known to be quite temperamental. However, he decided to channel his energies into his academic exploits.

In 1809, he was a awarded his first prize for excelling in class. When Keats was age 14, his mother of tuberculosis. His grandparents, therefore, placed him under the guardianship of two London merchants, Sandell and Abbey. Later that year, Keats was withdrawn from school and sent to a surgeon and apothecary, Thomas Hammond, to train as an apprentice. In 1816, he became a licensed apothecary but never set up a practice as he was drawn to literature and writing.

John Keats’ Early Works

John Keats had developed a passion for arts while he was at Clarke’s and this devotion could not be quenched. In 1814, at age 19, he wrote his first poem, “An Imitation of Spencer.” The poem used the Spenserian rhyme scheme and rich imagery to paint a picture of a romantic dream world.

Keats was drawn to the works of Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth, Thomas Chatterton and Samuel Coleridge. Driven by their influence, he was set on a literary course of Romanticism for the rest of his life. Keats wrote another poem, “O Solitude,” which appeared in the magazine, The Examiner .

In 1816, he went on a vacation with author, Charles Cowden Clarke. Through Clarke, Keats got acquainted with Leigh Hunt and Thomas Barnes, the editor of the Times. Barnes published his first collection of poems which included “Sleep and Poetry” and “I stood Tiptoe.” The publications were heavily condemned by some critics that the poems’ popularity was greatly affected. Determined to succeed as a poet, Keats took his work to other publishers, Taylor and Hessey, who showed interest in his collection. The poems were published and shortly afterwards, Keats was paid an advance and signed to a contract to write a book.

John Keats was introduced to lawyer Richard Woodhouse, who became his legal advisor and eventually a passionate collector of Keats’ works. Over time, he became a great source of Keats-related information.

How did John Keats die?

In early 1820, Keats was diagnosed of pulmonary tuberculosis. Upon his doctor’s advice to get to a place where the climate was milder, he moved abroad and arrived in Rome via Naples in November 1820. His health continued to decline and on February 23, 1821, he succumbed to the disease. He was only 25.

Most Notable Works

In spite of his life being cut short at a very age, i.e. 25, the English poet was still able to produce some very remarkable works. His works – i.e. poems and letters – are revered as some of the most beloved in the English literature. The following are 5 of the most famous works by John Keats:

“To Sleep” (1816)

This poem, which focuses on sleep and death, talks about Keats’ yearning to escape from physical torment and emotional despair. In the poem, he beckons sleep to come rescue him from his suffering and to take him into her embrace before he dies. He employs personification and metaphor to paint a picture of sleep. The poem clearly portrays Keats’ desire for peace and stability.

“Bright Star” (1819)

This poem is regarded by many as the best poem by Keats. Critics and scholars are divided with regards to whether or not it was written for his love interest, Fanny Brawne. However, most would agree that she is central to the poem. “Bright Star” has a Shakespearean scope and an extraordinary peace about it. Keats, through the poem, expresses his wish to spend the rest of his life lying on his lover’s breasts. Written less than three years before his death, he alludes to both celestial and earthly elements and blends them together to produce a deeply passionate poem.

“The Eve of St. Agnes” (1819)

January 20 is the eve of St. Agnes. This poem was crafted on the basis of the myth that if an unmarried girl carried out certain rituals, she could see her future husband in her dream. The theme evolves around Keats’ idyllic view of love. It is believed that it was written following his first meeting with Brawne. The rituals referred to in this poem included saying the Lord’s prayer, fasting all day, walking backwards upstairs and other weird activities.

 “La Belle Dame sans Merci” (1819)

This is arguably Keats’ most beloved and widely anthologized poems. The French title is reminiscent of medieval escapism, bringing to mind the era of polite knights, chivalry, and beautiful but dangerous women. The woman being described in the poem is beautiful but incapable of showing mercy. Though Keats conveys a sense of mutuality between the knight and the woman, he does not show exactly how equal they are.

“To Autumn” (1820)

This was written a year before Keats’ death. It is the first line of the poem that makes it truly memorable.  Without doubt, no other poet of his time managed to use extensive personification to create such a beautiful depiction of the autumn and to express its fruitfulness. Keats is able to compress the conditions of three months into three verses. Various readers would find the natural and simple language appealing on many levels.

“Ode to a Nightingale” (1819)

Depending on which source one looks at, John Keats wrote this masterpiece either in a garden in Hampstead, London or under a plum tree in the garden of his house. The latter is according to his friend Charles Armitage Brown. It’s also been said that Keats was inspired the song of a nightingale that had built a nest in his house. Another interesting fact about “Ode to a Nightingale” is that Keats used a few hours to compose it.

In the poem, Keats communicates to the reader the pessimism that appeared to be gnawing at his soul, ushering Keats further into what he describes as a state of “negative capability”. Some of the major themes that “Ode to a Nightingale” explores are transient nature of human life. Keats’ 80-line poem touches on nature and beauty and how we are surrounded by transient things.

Keats’ most prolific period was between 1818 and 1819. Image: The first 10 lines of John Keats’ poem “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819).

Style and Themes used by John Keats

The critics of Keats may not have been very receptive of his work, yet he was regarded as one of the greatest Romantics after his death. Argentine essayist and poet, Jorge Luis Borges, for example, admitted he had his most profound experience of his literary career the first time he stumbled upon Keats’ work.

Like many traditional Romantics, Keats possessed a distinctive style of crafting his poetry with particular focus on ancient folklore, the remote past and fairy tales. He uses these features to flee the difficult realities of his life in the modern 19th century.

What makes him stand out as a poet is his ability to make the most mundane things seem most appealing to his audience through the masterly use of vivid imagery. Again, Keats’ works are usually swamped with literary devices such as metaphors, personification, alliteration and  consonance. His poem, “Ode to Nightingale,” for instance, is overwhelmed with literary devices while “Lamia” and “Hyperion” have vivid connotations of sensuality. His themes are usually about  love, death, decay, immortality, suffering and nature which are also characteristic of Romanticism.

He is widely seen as one of the most prominent poets in the English language. His woks had tremendous influence on the Romanticism movement. The London-poet ranks as one of the most quoted English poets today.

The first line of his poem, “To Autumn,” inspired writer, Neil Gaiman to start his Sandman series. His work also influenced such poets as Alfred Lord Tennyson, Millais and Rossetti.

Jane Campion’s 2009 film “Bright Star,” starring  Ben Whishaw and Abbie Cornish, features the story of John Keat’s life. Whishaw was cast as Keats while Cornish played Fanny Brawne, Keats’ love interest.

The Houghton Library of the Harvard University stores the largest collection of the manuscripts and essays of Keats. Other collections can be found at Keats’ house in Hempstead, the British Library, and the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York.

In 1896, the London-based Royal Society of Arts unveiled a plaque of Keats to honor his memory.

Did You Know?

He was friends with fellow poet P.B. Shelley. And following the death of Keats in 1821, Shelley composed a poem titled “Adonaïs: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats”. Shelley invokes the death of Adonis, a figure in Greek mythology, as a metaphor to describe the passing of John Keats.

John Keats is said to have been inspired by fellow poets such as Leigh Hunt and Lord Byron.

When Keats was eight, his father, Thomas Keats, passed away in an accident. Tragedy struck again 6 years later, when his mother, Frances Jennings, died of tuberculosis.

Between 1818 and 1819, he produced his most well-received masterpieces, including his famous six odes.

He had a romantic relationship with Fanny Brawne, whom he engaged secretly in 1819. It is said that Fanny served as his muse. Keats was absolutely devoted to Fanny; he also secured Fanny’s mother’s approval. This devotion to his fiancée, whom he described as his ‘Bright Star’, is partly captured in his poem “Endymion”, a poem that is based on love story of the moon goddess Selene and the shepherd Endymion.

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John Keats summary

John Keats , (born Oct. 31, 1795, London, Eng.—died Feb. 23, 1821, Rome, Papal States), English Romantic poet. The son of a livery-stable manager, he had a limited formal education. He worked as a surgeon’s apprentice and assistant for several years before devoting himself entirely to poetry at age 21. His first mature work was the sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (1816). His long Endymion appeared in the same year (1818) as the first symptoms of the tuberculosis that would kill him at age 25. During a few intense months of 1819 he produced many of his greatest works: several great odes (including “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” and “To Autumn”), two unfinished versions of the story of the titan Hyperion, and “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” Most were published in the landmark collection Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820). Marked by vivid imagery, great sensuous appeal, and a yearning for the lost glories of the Classical world, his finest works are among the greatest of the English tradition. His letters are among the best by any English poet.

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66 Biography: John Keats

Portrait of John Keats

Artist |  William Hilton   Source | Wikimedia Commons   License | Public Domain

(1795-1821)

John Keats, like Blake, was trained in a profession. He studied to be a surgeon and was expected to earn his own living. His mother Frances Jennings was from the landed gentry; his father Thomas Keats was a livery stable-keeper. Because his society consequently placed him within the labor class, Keats’s decision to write poetry, a “genteel” art, was in itself a radical act.

Keats’ first published poems received harsh criticism, to some extent sharpened by Keats’ association with Hunt and by Keats’ lower class status. The conjunction of these criticisms and Keats’s death at the age of twenty-five led some contemporaries to believe that Keats died of a broken heart. This belief connected with some views of Keats’ poetry as sensual and emotional without intellectual heft. Keats’ letters, though, published after his death, demonstrate his extraordinary conceptual thinking, about poetry’s role in society and about what makes a poem or poet great.

His theory of Negative Capability in particular fleshes out his ideas on the imagination. Negative Capability is sustained potentiality; it allows all possibilities to exist at once in the imagination together without the poet reaching towards one and thus eliminating all of the others. Through Negative Capability, the poet sees both the world of color, or the rainbow world, and the world in black and white; sees  both the glittery surface of the ocean and the menacing whales beneath; sees both the delightful, delicate sparrow and the worm-ravening beast. Through Negative Capability, the poet doesn’t reach after fact or reason but allows all things—new stars, flowers bred by the fancy—to be. The completion of an experience is the negative capability, the not reaching after. For Keats, the poet sustains intensity and detachment, poise, suspension.

To learn medicine, Keats worked as a dresser, that is, the person who cleans up after the surgeons’ bloody work. He was apprenticed to a surgeon named Hammond—sometimes called “Butcher” Hammond—for five years, but stayed with him three and a half years. Keats then studied with well-known doctors, particularly Astley Cooper, who mentored Keats. After a year more of study, Keats began to doubt his abilities and interest in medicine. He took an apothecary license, but, with six months of study remaining for him to license as a surgeon, Keats left medicine for poetry.

This material is from  British Literature II: Romantic Era to the Twentieth Century and Beyond  by Bonnie J. Robinson from the University System of Georgia, which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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John Keats Biography (1911)

by Janice Campbell · Published May 30, 2014 · Updated November 20, 2023

One of the best known of the English Romantic poets, John Keats wrote only 54 poems during his short life (he died at the age of 25). This 1911 biography provides an overview of his life and work, though it is written in the wordy, florid style of the early 20th century. You may prefer to read the more contemporary biography at Poetry Foundation .

John Keats by Joseph Severn oil on ivory, 1819 (NPG 1605) © National Portrait Gallery, London Creative Commons License

John Keats  (1795-1821), English poet, was born on the 29th or 31st of October 1795 at the sign of the Swan and Hoop, 24 The Pavement, Moorfields, London. He published his first volume of verse in 1817, his second in the following year, his third in 1820, and died of consumption at Rome on the 23rd of February 1821 in the fourth month of his twenty-sixth year. (For the biographical facts see the later section of this article.)

• Analysis of Keat’s work

A poet of the first rank

The unrivaled odes.

• Keats’s place in literary history
• Details of Keats’s life

Keats turns to poetry

• Bibliography

Analysis of Keats’s work

In Keats’s first book there was little foretaste of anything greatly or even genuinely good; but between the marshy and sandy flats of sterile or futile verse there were undoubtedly some few purple patches of floral promise. The style was frequently detestable—a mixture of sham Spenserian and mock Wordsworthian , alternately florid and arid.

His second book,  Endymion , rises in its best passages to the highest level of Barnfield and of Lodge, the two previous poets with whom, had he published nothing more, he might most properly have been classed; and this, among minor minstrels, is no unenviable place. His third book raised him at once to a foremost rank in the highest class of English poets.

Shelley , up to twenty, had written little or nothing that would have done credit to a boy of ten; and of Keats also it may be said that the merit of his work at twenty five was hardly by comparison more wonderful than its demerit at twenty-two. His first book fell as flat as it deserved to fall; the reception of his second, though less considerate than on the whole it deserved, was not more contemptuous than that of immeasurably better books published about the same time by Coleridge, Landor and Shelley.

A critic of exceptional carefulness and candour might have noted in the first book so singular an example of a stork among the cranes as the famous and notable sonnet on Chapman’s Homer ; a just judge would have indicated, a partial advocate might have exaggerated, the value of such golden grain amid a garish harvest of tares as the hymn to Pan and the translation into verse of Titian’s Bacchanal which glorify the weedy wilderness of  Endymion .

Critical response to Endymion

But the hardest thing said of that poem by the  Quarterly  reviewer was unconsciously echoed by the future author of  Adonais —that it was all but absolutely impossible to read through; and the obscener insolence of the “Blackguard’s Magazine,” as Landor afterwards very justly labelled it, is explicable though certainly not excusable if we glance back at such a passage as that where Endymion exchanges fulsome and liquorish endearments with the “known unknown  from whom his being sips such darling  ( ! )  essence.  Such nauseous and pitiful phrases as these, and certain passages in his correspondence, make us understand the source of the most offensive imputations or insinuations levelled against the writer’s manhood; and, while admitting that neither his love-letters, nor the last piteous outcries of his wailing and shrieking agony, would ever have been made public by merciful or respectful editors, we must also admit that, if they ought never to have been published, it is no less certain that they ought never to have been written; that a manful kind of man or even a manly sort of boy, in his love-making or in his suffering, will not howl and snivel after such a lamentable fashion.

One thing hitherto inexplicable a very slight and rapid glance at his amatory correspondence will amply suffice to explain: how it came to pass that the woman so passionately beloved by so great a poet should have thought it the hopeless attempt of a mistaken kindness to revive the memory of a man for whom the best that could be wished was complete and compassionate oblivion. For the side of the man’s nature presented to her inspection, this probably was all that charity or reason could have desired. But that there was a finer side to the man, even if considered apart from the poet, his correspondence with his friends and their general evidence to his character give more sufficient proof than perhaps we might have derived from the general impression left on us by his works; though indeed the preface to  Endymion  itself, however illogical in its obviously implied suggestion that the poem published was undeniably unworthy of publication, gave proof or hint at least that after all its author was something of a man. And the eighteenth of his letters to Miss Brawne stands out in bright and brave contrast with such as seem incompatible with the traditions of his character on its manlier side.

But if it must be said that he lived long enough only to give promise of being a man, it must also be said that he lived long enough to give assurance of being a poet who was not born to come short of the first rank. Not even a hint of such a probability could have been gathered from his first or even from his second appearance; after the publication of his third volume it was no longer a matter of possible debate among judges of tolerable competence that this improbability had become a certainty. Two or three phrases cancelled, two or three lines erased, would have left us in  Lamia  one of the most faultless as surely as one of the most glorious jewels in the crown of English poetry.  Isabella , feeble and awkward in narrative to a degree almost incredible in a student of Dryden and a pupil of Leigh Hunt, is overcharged with episodical effects of splendid and pathetic expression beyond the reach of either.

The Eve of St Agnes , aiming at no doubtful success, succeeds in evading all casual difficulty in the line of narrative; with no shadow of pretence to such interest as may be derived from stress of incident or depth of sentiment, it stands out among all other famous poems as a perfect and unsurpassable study in pure colour and clear melody—a study in which the figure of Madeline brings back upon the mind’s eye, if only as moonlight recalls a sense of sunshine, the nuptial picture of Marlowe ‘s Hero and the sleeping presence of Shakespeare’s Imogen. Beside this poem should always be placed the less famous but not less precious  Eve of St Mark , a fragment unexcelled for the simple perfection of its perfect simplicity, exquisite alike in suggestion and in accomplishment.

The triumph of  Hyperion  is as nearly complete as the failure of  Endymion ; yet Keats never gave such proof of a manly devotion and rational sense of duty to his art as in his resolution to leave this great poem unfinished; not, as we may gather from his correspondence on the subject, for the pitiful reason assigned by his publishers, that of discouragement at the reception given to his former work, but on the solid and reasonable ground that a Miltonic study had something in its very scheme and nature too artificial, too studious of a foreign influence, to be carried on and carried out at such length as was implied by his original design. Fortified and purified as it had been on a first revision, when much introductory allegory and much tentative effusion of sonorous and superfluous verse had been rigorously clipped down or pruned away, it could not long have retained spirit enough to support or inform the shadowy body of a subject so little charged with tangible significance. The faculty of assimilation as distinguished from imitation, than which there can be no surer or stronger sign of strong and sure original genius, is not more evident in the most Miltonic passages of the revised  Hyperion  than in the more Shakespearian passages of the unrevised tragedy which no radical correction could have left other than radically incorrigible.

It is no conventional exaggeration, no hyperbolical phrase of flattery with more sound than sense in it, to say that in this chaotic and puerile play of  Otho the Great  there are such verses as Shakespeare might not without pride have signed at the age when he wrote and even at the age when he rewrote the tragedy of  Romeo and Juliet . The dramatic fragment of  King Stephen  shows far more power of hand and gives far more promise of success than does that of Shelley’s  Charles the First . Yet we cannot say with any confidence that even this far from extravagant promise would certainly or probably have been kept; it is certain only that Keats in these attempts did at least succeed in showing a possibility of future excellence as a tragic or at least a romantic dramatist. In every other line of high and serious poetry his triumph was actual and consummate; here only was it no more than potential or incomplete.

As a ballad of the more lyrical order,  La Belle dame sans merci  is not less absolutely excellent, less triumphantly perfect in force and clearness of impression, that as a narrative poem is  Lamia . In his lines on Robin Hood, and in one or two other less noticeable studies of the kind, he has shown thorough and easy mastery of the beautiful metre inherited by Fletcher from Barnfield and by Milton from Fletcher. The simple force of spirit and style which distinguishes the genuine ballad manner from all spurious attempts at an artificial simplicity was once more at least achieved in his verses on the crowning creation of Scott’ s humaner and manlier genius— Meg Merrilies .

No little injustice has been done to Keats by such devotees as fix their mind’s eye only on the more salient and distinctive notes of a genius which in fact was very much more various and tentative, less limited and peculiar, than would be inferred from an exclusive study of his more specially characteristic work. But within the limits of that work must we look of course for the genuine credentials of his fame; and highest among them we must rate his unequalled and unrivalled odes. Of these 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 to Autumn and that on a Grecian Urn ; the most radiant, fervent and musical is that to a Nightingale ; the most pictorial and perhaps the tenderest in its ardour of passionate fancy is that to Psyche; the subtlest in sweetness of thought and feeling is that on Melancholy .

Greater lyrical poetry the world may have seen than any that is in these; lovelier it surely has never seen, nor ever can it possibly see. From the divine fragment of an unfinished ode to Maia we can but guess that if completed it would have been worthy of a place beside the highest. His remaining lyrics have many beauties about them, but none perhaps can be called thoroughly beautiful. He has certainly left us one perfect sonnet of the first rank and as certainly he has left us but one.

Keats’s place in literary history

Keats has been promoted by modern criticism to a place beside Shakespeare. The faultless force and the profound subtlety of his deep and cunning instinct for the absolute expression of absolute natural beauty can hardly be questioned or overlooked; and this is doubtless the one main distinctive gift or power which denotes him as a poet among all his equals, and gives him a right to rank for ever beside Coleridge and Shelley.

As a man, the two admirers who did best service to his memory were Lord Houghton and Matthew Arnold. These alone, among all of their day who have written of him without the disadvantage or advantage of a personal acquaintance, have clearly seen and shown us the manhood of the man. That ridiculous and degrading legend which imposed so strangely on the generous tenderness of Shelley, while evoking the very natural and allowable laughter of Byron, fell to dust at once for ever on the appearance of Lord Houghton’s biography, which gave perfect proof to all time that “men have died and worms have eaten them” but not for fear of critics or through suffering inflicted by reviews.

Somewhat too sensually sensitive Keats may have been in either capacity, but the nature of the man was as far as was the quality of the poet above the pitiful level of a creature whose soul could “let itself be snuffed out by an article”; and, in fact, owing doubtless to the accident of a death which followed so fast on his early appearance and his dubious reception as a poet, the insolence and injustice of his reviewers in general have been comparatively and even considerably exaggerated. Except from the chief fountain-head of professional ribaldry then open in the world of literary journalism, no reek of personal insult arose to offend his nostrils; and the tactics of such unwashed malignants were inevitably suicidal; the references to his brief experiment of apprenticeship to a surgeon which are quoted from  Blackwood , in the shorter as well as in the longer memoir by Lord Houghton, could leave no bad odour behind them save what might hang about men’s yet briefer recollection of his assailant’s unmemorable existence.

The false Keats, therefore, whom Shelley pitied and Byron despised would have been, had he ever existed, a thing beneath compassion or contempt. That such a man could have had such a genius is almost evidently impossible; and yet more evident is the proof which remains on everlasting record that none was ever further from the chance of decline to such degradation than the real and actual man who made that name immortal.

Details of Keats’s life

He was the eldest son of Thomas Keats and his wife Frances Jennings, and was baptized at St Botolph’s, Bishopsgate, on the 18th of December 1795. The entry of his baptism is supplemented by a marginal note stating that he was born on the 31st of October.

Thomas Keats was employed in the Swan and Hoop livery stables, Finsbury Pavement, London. He had married his master’s daughter, and managed the business on the retirement of his father-in-law. In April 1804 Thomas Keats was killed by a fall from his horse, and within a year of this event Mrs Keats married William Rawlings, a stable keeper. The marriage proved an unhappy one, and in 1806 Mrs Rawlings, with her children John, George, Thomas and Frances Mary (afterwards Mrs Llanos, d. 1889), went to live at Edmonton with her mother, who had inherited a considerable competence from her husband.

There is evidence that Keats’s parents were by no means of the commonplace type that might be hastily inferred from these associations. They had desired to send their sons to Harrow, but John Keats and his two brothers were eventually sent to a school kept by John Clarke at Enfield, where he became intimate with his master’s son, Charles Cowden Clarke. His vivacity of temperament showed itself at school in a love of fighting, but in the last year of his school life he developed a great appetite for reading of all sorts.

In 1810 he left school to be apprenticed to Mr Thomas Hammond, a surgeon in Edmonton. He was still within easy reach of his old school, where he frequently borrowed books, especially the works of Spenser and the Elizabethans. With Hammond he quarrelled before the termination of his apprenticeship, and in 1814 the connexion was broken by mutual consent.

His mother had died in 1810, and in 1814 Mrs Jennings. The children were left in the care of two guardians, one of whom, Richard Abbey, seems to have made himself solely responsible. John Keats went to London to study at Guy’s and St Thomas’s hospitals, living at first alone at 8 Dean Street, Borough, and later with two fellow students in St Thomas’s Street. It does not appear that he neglected his medical studies, but his chief interest was turned to poetry.

In March 1816 he became a dresser at Guy’s, but about the same time his poetic gifts were stimulated by an acquaintance formed with Leigh Hunt. His friendship with Benjamin Haydon, the painter, dates from later in the same year. Hunt introduced him to Shelley, who showed the younger poet a constant kindness. In 1816 Keats moved to the Poultry to be with his brothers George and Tom, the former of whom was then employed in his guardian’s counting-house, but much of the poet’s time was spent at Leigh Hunt’s cottage at Hampstead.

In the winter of 1816-1817 he definitely abandoned medicine, and in the spring appeared  Poems by John Keats  dedicated to Leigh Hunt, and published by Charles and James Ollier. On the 14th of April he left London to find quiet for work. He spent some time at Shanklin, Isle of Wight, then at Margate and Canterbury, where he was joined by his brother Tom. In the summer the three brothers took lodgings in Well Walk, Hampstead, where Keats formed a fast friendship with Charles Wentworth Dilke and Charles Armitage Brown. In September of the same year (1817) he paid a visit to his friend, Benjamin Bailey, at Oxford, and in November he finished  Eudymion  at Burford Bridge, near Dorking.

His youngest brother had developed consumption, and in March John went to Teignmouth to nurse him in place of his brother George, who had decided to sail for America with his newly married wife, Georgiana Wylie. In May (1818) Keats returned to London, and soon after appeared  Endymion: A Poetic Romance  (1818), bearing on the title-page as motto “The stretched metre of an antique song.” Late in June Keats and his friend Armitage Brown started on a walking tour in Scotland, vividly described in the poet’s letters. The fatigue and hardship involved proved too great a strain for Keats, who was forbidden by an Inverness doctor to continue his tour. He returned to London by boat, arriving on the 18th of August.

The autumn was spent in constant attendance on his brother Tom, who died at the beginning of December. There is no doubt that he resented the attacks on him in  Blackwood’s Magazine  (August 1818), and the  Quarterly Review  (April 1818, published only in September), but his chief preoccupations were elsewhere.

After his brother’s death he went to live with his friend Brown. He had already made the acquaintance of Fanny Brawne, a girl of seventeen, who lived with her mother close by. For her Keats quickly developed a consuming passion. He was in indifferent health, and, owing partly to Mr Abbey’s mismanagement, in difficulties for money. Nevertheless his best work belongs to this period. In July 1819 he went to Shanklin, living with James Rice. They were soon joined by Brown.

The next two months Keats spent with Brown at Winchester, enjoying an interval of calmness due to his absence from Fanny Brawne. At Winchester he completed  Lamia  and  Otho the Great , which he had begun in conjunction with Brown, and began his historical tragedy of  King Stephen . Before Christmas he had returned to London and his bondage to Fanny. In January 1820 his brother George paid a short visit to London, but received no confidence from him.

The fatal nature of Keats’s illness showed itself on the 3rd of February, but in March he recovered sufficiently to be present at the private view of Haydon’s picture of “Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem.” In May he removed to a lodging in Wesleyan Place, Kentish Town, to be near Leigh Hunt who eventually took him into his house. In July appeared his third and last book,  Lamia ,  Isabella ,  The Eve of St Agnes and other Poems  (1820).

Keats left the Hunts abruptly in August in consequence of a delay in receiving one of Fanny Brawne’s letters which had been broken open by a servant. He went to Wentworth Place, where he was taken in by the Brawnes. The suggestion that he should spend the winter in Italy was followed up by an invitation from Shelley to Pisa. This, however, he refused. But on the 18th of September 1820 he set out for Naples in company with Joseph Severn, the artist, who had long been his friend. The travellers settled in the Piazza de Spagna, Rome. Keats was devotedly tended by Dr (afterwards Sir) James Clarke and Severn, and died on the 23rd of February 1821. He was buried on the 27th in the old Protestant cemetery, near the pyramid of Cestius.

Bibliography —Keats’s friends provided the material for the authoritative biography of the poet by Richard Monckton Milnes (afterwards Lord Houghton) entitled  Life, Letters and Literary Remains of John Keats  (1848; revised ed., 1867).  The Poetical Works of John Keats  were issued with a memoir by R. M. Milnes in 1854, 1863, 1865, 1866, 1867, and in the Aldine edition, 1876. The standard edition of Keats is  The Poetical Works and other Writings of John Keats now first brought together, including Poems and numerous Letters not before published, edited with notes and appendices  by Harry Buxton Forman (4 vols., 1883; re-issue with corrections and additions, 1889). Of the many other editions of Keats’s poems may be mentioned that in the Muses’ Library,  The Poems of John Keats  (1896), edited by G. Thorn Drury with an introduction by Robert Bridges, and another by E. de Sélincourt, 1905.  The Letters of John Keats to Fanny Brawne  (1889) were edited with introduction and notes by H. Buxton Forman, and the  Letters of John Keats to his Family and Friends  (1891) by Sidney Colvin, who is also the author of the monograph,  Keats  (1887), in the English Men of Letters Series. See also  The Papers of a Critic. Selected from the Writings of the late Charles Wentworth Dilke  (1875), and for further bibliographical information and particulars of MS. sources the “Editor’s Preface,” &c. to a reprint edited by H. Buxton Forman (Glasgow, 1900). A facsimile of Keats’s autograph MS. of “Hyperion,” purchased by the British Museum in 1904, was published by E. de Sélincourt (Oxford, 1905).

This brief biography is adapted from the  Wikisource 1911 Encyclopedia Project , which offers the following disclaimer: “This document is based upon the knowledge available in 1911 and may be inaccurate, especially in the areas of science, law, and ethnography. Readers should only use the information as a historical reference.”

WRITING EXERCISE: Rewrite the biography, or your selection of sentences or paragraphs from it, in a more modern style.

You can enjoy Keats’s poetry from Excellence in Literature here.

When will you read John Keats’s writing in Excellence in Literature?

You will study John Keats in EIL Unit 4 (British Literature)

Literary Connections: American poet Amy Lowell wrote a biography of John Keats, published in 1925 .

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