John Keats

Keats, John (1795-1821), English poet and letter writer whose work carried the Romantic movement in England to rich maturity. Despite his tragically early death at the age of 25, Keats composed poetry of great power and beauty in a surprisingly wide variety of kinds: a fragmentary epic, Hyperion; several romances, including Endymion and The Eve of St. Agnes; and a miscellany of shorter lyrics, of which the best known are the sonnets and a series of major odes, including "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," and "To Autumn." Keats's famous letters record the growth of his art and thought in vivid and moving detail.

Keats's literary influence has been extensive; among later writers who admired and imitated his work were Tennyson, Browning, and Yeats. Although Keats has been categorized as a "poet's poet," whose dedication to art overrode all other considerations, moral, political, and religious, a truer portrait would stress his moral centrality and his balanced good sense as a man and artist, as well as his superb practical command of his craft. Keats today ranks among the very few poets who can bear comparison, by virtue of their imaginative amplitude and power, to Shakespeare.

Life. Keats was born in London on Oct. 31, 1795. His mother, Frances Keats, was the only daughter of John Jennings, the owner of the Swan and Hoop, a livery stable near the northern boundary of the city. His father, Thomas Keats, was head ostler at the stable, later becoming manager and, in 1803, owner. Keats was the first of five children. He had three brothers (George, Tom, and a brother who died in infancy, Edward) and a sister, Frances (or Fanny).

Early Life and Education. In 1803, at the age of eight, Keats was sent to the Clarke Academy in Enfield, a country village to the north of London. The school was known for its progressive views of pedagogy and discipline, as well as for a kindly headmaster, and Keats's years there appear to have been generally happy. His classmates remembered him not for literary precocity but for his "terrier courage"; he was a high-spirited and scrappy boy who, though short in stature, delighted in a just fray, as when he defended a younger brother against a bully. In his last years at the school, Keats became an omnivorous reader, won several prizes for academic excellence, and began a translation of Virgil's Aeneid. At Enfield, he met his first literary mentor and loyal friend, Charles Cowden Clarke, son of the headmaster. (See also Clarke, Charles Cowden.)

Keats's father died suddenly in April 1804 after a fall from a horse. The children then went to live with their grandparents and, on their grandfather's death in 1805, moved with their grandmother to Edmonton, a village near Enfield. After a short-lived second marriage, Keats's mother joined the family in Edmonton. She died of tuberculosis in 1810, nursed in her last days by John. The children's grandmother died in 1814, leaving a substantial trust fund of over Ð'Ј800, the greater part of which was tied up in litigation and never reached the children. As their guardian and trustee she chose a respectable tea merchant, Richard Abbey, who proved an unfortunate choice. Abbey quietly concealed from the children the full amount of the inheritance, adding greatly to their later financial worries.

On his departure from school in 1811, Keats decided on a career in medicine, and for the next four years, he was an apprentice to a surgeon-apothecary in Edmonton. In 1815 he entered Guy's Hospital in London for a year of training, and he received his apothecary's certificate in 1816.

Literary Career. Meanwhile, Keats's literary interests flowered into a serious dedication to poetry. During his apprentice years Keats tried his hand at writing some lyric poems and kept up his literary friendship with Clarke. In summer 1816 he finally decided to give up medicine, make do as best he could on his meager and uncertain inheritance, and devote himself to a career in poetry. His first published poem, a sonnet, "To Solitude," appeared on May 5, 1816, in the Examiner, a liberal journal edited by the poet-journalist Leigh Hunt; his first great poem, the sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, dates from October. Keats now made important literary contacts: Benjamin Robert Haydon, painter and diarist; Leigh Hunt; and, through Hunt, such poets and critics as Shelley, Wordsworth, Charles Lamb, and William Hazlitt. Closer to Keats were a number of lesser-known men, including Richard Woodhouse, Benjamin Bailey, and John Hamilton Reynolds, the recipient of several of Keats's most thoughtful letters.

In spring 1817 Keats and his brothers took rooms at 1 Well Walk in the London suburb of Hampstead. Early in March Haydon took him to see the sculptures brought by Lord Elgin from the Acropolis in AthensвЂ"an aesthetic revelation that he recorded in a sonnet. (See also Elgin Marbles.) His first volume, Poems, also appeared in March and was reviewed favorably in several journals. In April Keats began his first long poem, the romance Endymion, at which he labored throughout the summer and fall. It was finished in late November and published in May 1818.

The year 1818 saw many changes, most of them distressing. During much of the spring and fall, Keats nursed his brother Tom, who died of tuberculosis on December 1 after a long and painful decline. In April he composed a second narrative poem, Isabella; or The Pot of Basil. In June he lost the company of his brother George, who sailed for America with his new wife and eventually made a success of a lumber business in Louisville, Ky. Keats spent the next two months with a friend, Charles Brown, on a walking tour through northern England, Scotland, and Ireland. Not long after returning to London, he met and fell in love with Fanny Brawne, the 18-year-old daughter of a Hampstead widow. Despite the torment that this love would cause Keats in the following years, when illness and professional setbacks made marriage impossible, Fanny should be remembered as she was, a loyal and loving friend.

In September two savage attacks on Endymion appeared in the influential and politically conservative Quarterly Review and Blackwood's Magazine. Although their true target was the liberal Hunt, whose literary influence Keats had decisively rejected nearly a year earlier, the reviews ridiculed him as Hunt's disciple and an upstart "Cockney poet." (See also Hunt, Leigh; Blackwood's Magazine.) Indignant friends later blamed the reviewers, J. G. Lockhart and John Wilson Croker, for the poet's death, a perhaps pardonable sentimentality that, unfortunately, is alluded to on his