Poet, born in London, UK. Educated at Enfield, he was apprenticed to a surgeon and became a dresser at Guy's Hospital, London. Leigh Hunt introduced him to other young Romantics, including Shelley, and published his first sonnets in the Examiner (1816). His first book of poems was published in 1817. His long mythological poem Endymion (1818) was attacked by the critics as the writing of an ignorant apothecary, but he was nonetheless able to write Lamia and Other Poems (1820), a landmark in English poetry, which contains The Eve of St Agnes and Lamia, and his major odes. Seriously ill with tuberculosis, he sailed for Italy, and died in Rome. He was buried in the Protestant cemetery in Rome, where his friend David Severn designed a monument for him. His Letters (1848) are among the most celebrated in the language, and he is regarded as one of the principal figures of the Romantic movement.
Keats redirects here, for other meanings, see Keats (disambiguation).
John Keats (October 31, 1795 – February 23, 1821) was one of the principal poets of the English Romantic movement. He often felt himself working in the shadow of past poets, particularly Milton and Spenser, and only towards the end of his life produced his most original and most memorable poems, including a series of odes that remain among the most popular poems in English.
Life
Keats was born in Finsbury Pavement in London, where his father, Thomas Keats, was a hostler. The pub is now called "The John Keats at Moorgate," only a few yards from Moorgate station. Keats lived happily for the first seven years of his life. His mother, Frances Jennings Keats, remarried soon afterwards, but as quickly left the new husband and moved herself and her four children (a son had died in infancy) to live with Keats' grandmother. There, Keats attended a school that first instilled in him a love of literature.
The grandmother appointed two guardians to take care of her new charges, and these guardians removed Keats from his old school to become a surgeon's apprentice. Keats travelled to the Isle of Wight in the spring of 1817, where he spent a week.
He soon found his brother, Tom Keats, entrusted to his care. Finishing his epic poem "Endymion", Keats left to hike in Scotland and Ireland with his friend Charles Brown. In 1818, Tom Keats died from his infection, and John Keats moved again, to live in Brown's house in London. There he met Fanny Brawne, who with her mother had been staying at Brown's house, and he quickly fell in love. In the diary of Fanny Brawne was found only one sentence regarding the separation: "Mr Keats has left Hampstead."
This relationship was cut short when, by 1820, Keats began showing worse signs of the disease that had plagued his family. Keats moved into a house on the Spanish Steps, in Rome, where despite attentive care from Severn and Dr. John Clark, the poet's health rapidly deteriorated.
Shelley and Byron erroneously blamed his death on an article published shortly before in the Quarterly Review, with a scathing attack on Keats's Endymion; The offending article was long believed to be written by William Gifford, though later shown to be the work of John Wilson Croker.
Career and criticism
His introduction to the work of Edmund Spenser, particularly The Faerie Queene, was to prove a turning point in Keats' development as a poet; it was to inspire Keats to write his first poem, Imitation of Spenser. In 1817, Keats published his first volume of poetry entitled simply Poems. Keats produced some of his finest poetry during the spring and summer of 1819; in fact, the period from September 1818 to September 1819 is often referred to among Keats scholars as the Great Year, or the Living Year, because it was during this period that he was most productive and that he wrote his most critically acclaimed works. Several major events have been noted as factors in this increased productivity: namely, the death of his brother Tom, the critical reviews of Endymion, and his meeting of Fanny Brawne. The famous odes he produced during the spring and summer of 1819 include: Ode to Psyche, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on Melancholy, and To Autumn.
Keats developed his poetic theories, chief among them Negative Capability and The Mansion of Many Apartments, in letters to friends and family.
William Butler Yeats was intrigued by the contrast between the "deliberate happiness" of Keats's poetry and the sadness that characterised his life.
Wallace Stevens described Keats as the "Secretary for Porcelain" in Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas.
User Comments Add a comment…