Short Biography Of John Keats

Meet John Keats

"Mortality," wrote John Keats, "weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep." Keats penned these words at twenty-one, soon after launching his poetic career. In five years, he was dead. To say he made the most of his time would be an understatement, for no other poet progressed so far so fast.

As a boy at school, the small but spirited Keats made his mark as an athlete. He took no special interest in literature, however, until he was fifteen. With his teacher Charles Cowden Clarke's encouragement, he then threw himself headlong into reading, going through Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, Clarke recalled, "as a young horse through a spring meadow--ramping!"

No sooner had Keats awakened to literature than he was pulled out of school by his practical-minded guardian and apprenticed to the pharmacist-surgeon Thomas Hammond, to whom Keats studied medicine. Keats continued to read with his former teacher, though, walking the two miles to Clarke's house twice a week. Four years into his unhappy apprenticeship, Keats broke with Hammond and entered Guy's Hospital in London to continue his medical studies. But at twenty-one, he abandoned medicine for poetry.

Up to that time, Keats had written few poems--and certainly none of artistic importance. Then, after spending a whole night with Clarke reading from the poet George Chapman's forceful translation of Homer, he produced his first major poem: "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer." Clarke showed it to Leigh Hunt, a political radical and writer, who published it and other early Keats poems in his journal the Examiner.

With hunt's help, Keats found a publisher for his first book when he was still twenty-one. It sold poorly and got mixed reviews. Endymion, a long allegorical poem published the following year, fared even worse. After reviewing the poem, critic