John
Keats
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.
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"A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore..." |
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.
A
Selected Bibliography
Poetry
Poems
(1817)Endymion: A Poetic Romance (1818)
Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820)
