John Keats Biography

English lyric poet, the archetype of the Romantic writer. While still in good health, Keats was the opposite of overburdened, sensitive soul. Keats felt that the deepest meaning of life lay in the apprehension of material beauty, although his mature poems reveal his fascination with a world of death and decay. Most of his best work appeared in one year.

Keats was born in London as the son of a livery-stable manager. He was the oldest of four children, who remained deeply devoted to each other. After their father died in 1804, Keats's mother remarried but the marriage was soon broken. She moved with the children, John and his sister Fanny and brothers George and Tom, to live with her mother at Edmonton, near London. She died of tuberculosis in 1810.

At school Keats read widely. He was educated at Clarke's School in Enfield, where he began a translation of the Aeneid. 1811 he was apprenticed to a surgeon-apothecary. His first poem, 'Lines in Imitation of Spenser', was written in 1814. In that year he moved to London and resumed his surgical studies in 1815 as a student at Guy's hospital. Next year he became a Licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries. Before devoting himself entirely to poetry, Keats worked as a dresser and junior house surgeon. In London he had met the editor of The Examiner, Leigh Hunt, who introduced him to other young Romantics, including Shelley. His poem, 'O Solitude', also appeared in The Examiner.

Keats's first book, Poems, was published in 1817. Sales were poor. He spent the spring with his brother Tom and friends at Shankin. It was about this time Keats started to use his letters as the vehicle of his thoughts of poetry. They mixed the everyday events of his own life with comments with his correspondence. Among others T.S. Eliot considered the letters in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933) "certainly the most notable and most important ever written by any English poet'. Endymion, Keats's first long poem appeared, when he was 21. It told in 4000 lines of the love of the moon goddess Cynthia for the young shepherd Endymion. Keats's greatest works were written in the late 1810s, among them Lamia, The Eve of St. Agnes, the great odes and two versions of Hyperion. He worked briefly as a theatrical critic for The Champion, spent summer of 1818 touring the Lakes, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and after returning to London he spent the next three months attending his brother Tom, who was seriously ill with tuberculosis.

After Tom's death in December, Keats moved to Hampstead. In the winter of 1818-19 he worked mainly on Hyperion and The Eve of St Agnes. The fragmentary Eve of St Mark were composed during a visit to his friend Charles Wentworth Dilke's parents and relatives in Sussex. In 1819 Keats finished Lamia, and wrote another version of Hyperion, called The Fall of Hyperion. His famous poem 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' was inspired by a Wedgwood copy of a Roman copy of a Greek vase. Josiah Wedgwood's copy was purchased by Sir William Hamilton, who sold it to the duchess of Portland, who denoted the vase to the British Museum in 1784.

In 1820 appeared the second volume of Keats poems. It gained a huge critical success. However, Keats was suffering from tuberculosis and his poems were marked with sadness partly because he was too poor to marry Fanny Brawne, the woman he loved. In a letter from 1819 he wrote. "I love you more in that I believe you have liked me for my own sake and nothing else. I have met with women whom I relay think would like to be married to a Poem and given away by a Novel." When his condition gradually worsened, he sailed for Italy with his friend, the painter Joseph Severn, to escape England's cold winter. Declining Shelley's invitation to join him at Pisa, Keats went to Rome, where he died at the age of 25, on February 23, 1821. Keats did not invent his own epitaph, but remembered words from the play Philaster, or Love Lies-Ableeding, written by Beaumont and Fletcher in 1611. "All your better deeds / Shall be in water writ," one of the characters says. Keats told his friend Joseph Severn that he wanted on his grave just the line, "Here lies one whose name was writ in water."

In spite of early harsh criticism, Keats's reputation grew after his death. The poet's letters were published in 1848 and 1878. Keats's works have influenced among others The Pre-Raphaelites, Oscar Wilde and Alfred Tennyson. Some later poets have attacked Keats and the Romantics: for T.S. Eliot Byron was "a disorderly mind, and an uninteresting one" and Keats and Shelley were "not nearly such great poets as they are supposed to be".