About john keats biography summary

English Romantic poet (–)

For the American writer and biographer, observe John Keats (writer).

"Keats" redirects here. For other uses, see Keats (disambiguation).

John Keats (31 October – 23 February ) was an English poet of the second generation of Romantic poets, along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley.

His poems had been in publication for less than four years when he died of tuberculosis at the age of They were indifferently received in his lifetime, but his fame grew rapidly after his death.^[1] By the conclude of the century, he was placed in the canon of English literature, strongly influencing many writers of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; the Encyclopædia Britannica of called one ode "one of the final masterpieces".

Keats had a style "heavily loaded with sensualities", notably in the series of odes. Typically of the Romantics, he accentuated extreme emotion through natural imagery. Today his poems and letters remain among the most popular and analysed in English literature – in particular "Ode to a Nightingale", "Ode on a Grecian Urn", "Sleep and Poetry" and the sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer".

Jorge Luis Borges named his first time reading Keats an experience he felt all his life.

Early life and education, –

John Keats was born in Moorgate, London, on 31 October , to Thomas and Frances Keats (née Jennings).

There is little evidence of his exact birthplace. Although Keats and his family seem to own marked his birthday on 29 October, baptism records give the date as the 31st.^[2][3] He was the eldest of four surviving children; his younger siblings were George (–), Thomas (–), and Frances Mary "Fanny" (–), who later married the Spanish author Valentín de Llanos Gutiérrez&#;[es].^[4]

Another son was lost in infancy.

His father first worked as an ostler^[5] at the stables attached to the Swan and Hoop Inn owned by his father-in-law, John Jennings, an establishment he later managed, and where the growing family lived for some years.

Keats believed he was born at the inn, a birthplace of humble origins, but there is no evidence to support this.^[3] The Globe pub now occupies the site, a few yards from latest Moorgate station.^{[6][7][nb 1]} Keats was baptised at St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate, and sent to a local dame school as a child.^[2][8]

His parents wished to send their sons to Eton or Harrow, but the family decided they could not afford the fees.^[9][10][11] In the summer of , John was sent to board at John Clarke's school in Enfield, close to his grandparents' dwelling.

The small school had a liberal outlook and a linear curriculum more modern than the larger, more prestigious schools.^[12] In the family atmosphere at Clarke's, Keats developed an interest in classics and history, which would stay with him throughout his short life.^[12]

The headmaster's son, Charles Cowden Clarke, also became an important mentor and friend, introducing Keats to Renaissance literature, including Tasso, Spenser, and Chapman's translations.

The young Keats was described by his friend Edward Holmes as a volatile character, "always in extremes", given to indolence and fighting. At 13 he began focusing his energy on reading and study, winning his first academic prize in midsummer ^[12]

In April , when Keats was eight, his father died from a skull fracture after falling from his horse while returning from a visit to Keats and his brother George at school.^[13] Thomas Keats died intestate.

Frances remarried two months later, but left her fresh husband soon afterwards, and the four children went to survive with a grandmother, Alice Jennings, in the village of Edmonton.^[14]

In March , when Keats was 14, his mother died of tuberculosis, leaving the children in their grandmother's custody.

She appointed two guardians, Richard Abbey and John Sandell, for them. That autumn, Keats left Clarke's college to be an apprentice with Thomas Hammond, a surgeon and apothecary who was a neighbour and the doctor of the Jennings family. Keats lodged in the attic above the surgery, at 7 Church Street, until ^[3] Cowden Clarke, who remained close to Keats, called this period "the most placid second in Keats' life."^[15]

From Keats had two bequests, held in belief for him until his 21st birthday.

£ was willed by his grandfather John Jennings. Also Keats's mother left a legacy of £ to be equally divided among her living children.^{[nb 2][16][3]} It seems he was not told of the £ and probably knew nothing of it as he never applied for it.

Historically, blame has often been laid on Abbey as legal guardian, but he may also have been unknowing of it.^[17] William Walton, solicitor for Keats's mother and grandmother, definitely knew and had a duty of care to relay the information to Keats.

It seems he did not, though it would have made a critical difference to the poet's expectations. Money was always a great concern and difficulty, as he struggled to stay out of debt and make his way in the world independently.^[3]

Career

Medical training and writing poetry

In October , having finished his five-year apprenticeship with Hammond, Keats registered as a medical student at Guy's Hospital, now part of King's College London, and began studying there.

Within a month, he was acknowledged as a dresser at the hospital assisting surgeons during operations, the equivalent of a junior house surgeon today. It was a significant promotion, that marked a distinct aptitude for medicine; and it brought greater responsibility and a heavier workload.^[3]

Keats's prolonged and expensive medical training with Hammond and at Guy's Hospital led his family to believe he would pursue a lifelong career in medicine, assuring financial security, and it seems that, at this point, Keats had a genuine desire to grow a doctor.^[3][12] He lodged proximate the hospital, at 28 St Thomas's Street in Southwark, with other medical students, including Henry Stephens who gained fame as an inventor and ink magnate.^[18]

Keats's training took up increasing amounts of his writing time and he became increasingly ambivalent about it.

He felt he was facing a stark choice.^[12][19] He had written his first extant poem, "An Imitation of Spenser", in , when he was Now, strongly drawn by ambition, inspired by fellow poets such as Leigh Hunt and Lord Byron, and beleaguered by family financial crises, he suffered periods of depression.

His brother George wrote that John "feared that he should never be a poet, & if he was not he would destroy himself."^[20] In , Keats received his apothecary's licence, which made him eligible to practise as an apothecary, physician and surgeon, but before the end of the year he informed his guardian that he resolved to be a poet, not a surgeon.^[3]

Publication and literary circles

Although he continued his work and training at Guy's, Keats devoted more and more time to the research of literature, experimenting with verse forms, particularly the sonnet.^[3] In May , Leigh Hunt agreed to publish the sonnet "O Solitude" in his magazine The Examiner, a leading liberal magazine of the day.^[21] This was the first appearance of Keats's poetry in print; Charles Cowden Clarke called it his friend's red letter day,^[22] first proof that Keats' ambitions were valid.

John Keats - Wikipedia: John Keats (born October 31, , London, England—died February 23, , Rome, Papal States [Italy]) was an English Romantic lyric poet who devoted his short existence to the perfection of a poetry marked by vivid imagery, great sensuous appeal, and an attempt to express a philosophy through classical legend.

Among his poems of was To My Brothers.^[23] That summer, Keats went with Clarke to the seaside town of Margate to record. There he began "Calidore" and initiated an era of superb letter writing. On returning to London, he took lodgings at 8 Dean Street, Southwark, and braced himself to study further for membership of the Royal College of Surgeons.^[24]

In October Clarke introduced Keats to the leading Leigh Hunt, a close partner of Byron and Shelley.

Five months later came the publication of Poems, the first volume of Keats's verse, which included "I stood tiptoe" and "Sleep and Poetry", both strongly influenced by Hunt.^[21] The book was a critical failure, arousing short-lived interest, although Reynolds reviewed it favourably in The Champion.^[12] Clarke commented that the book "might have emerged in Timbuctoo."^[3]

Keats's publishers, Charles and James Ollier, felt ashamed of it.

Keats immediately changed publishers to Taylor and Hessey in Fleet Street.^[25] Unlike the Olliers, Keats's new publishers were enthusiastic about his labor. Within a month of the publication of Poems they were planning a new Keats volume and had paid him an advance.

Hessey became a constant friend to Keats and made the company's rooms available for young writers to meet. Their publishing lists came to involve Coleridge, Hazlitt, Clare, Hogg, Carlyle and Charles Lamb.^[26]

Through Taylor and Hessey, Keats met their Eton-educated lawyer, Richard Woodhouse, who advised them on literary as successfully as legal matters and was deeply impressed by Poems.

Although he noted that Keats could be "wayward, trembling, easily daunted," Woodhouse was convinced of Keats's genius, a poet to encourage as he became one of England's greatest writers. Soon after they met, the two became close friends, and Woodhouse started to collect Keatsiana, documenting as much as he could about the poetry.

This archive survives as one of the main sources of information on Keats's work.^[3] Andrew Motion represents him as Boswell to Keats's Johnson, ceaselessly promoting his work, fighting his corner and spurring his poetry to greater heights.

In later years, Woodhouse was one of the few to accompany Keats to Gravesend, Kent, to embark on his final trip to Rome.^[27]

Despite the bad reviews of Poems, Hunt published the essay "Three Young Poets" (Shelley, Keats, and Reynolds) and the sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer", foreseeing great things to come.^[28] He introduced Keats to many prominent men in his circle, including the editor of The Times, Thomas Barnes; the writer Charles Lamb; the conductor Vincent Novello; and the poet John Hamilton Reynolds, who would become a close friend.^[29] Keats also met regularly with William Hazlitt, a powerful literary figure of the day.

It was a turning point for Keats, establishing him in the public eye as a figure in what Hunt termed "a new school of poetry".^[30]

At this time Keats wrote to his friend Bailey, "I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the imagination.

What imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth."^[31][32] This corridor would eventually be transmuted into the concluding lines of "Ode on a Grecian Urn": "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know".

In early December , under the heady influence of his imaginative friends, Keats told Abbey he had decided to give up medicine in favour of poetry, to Abbey's fury. Keats had spent a great deal on his medical training, and despite his state of financial hardship and indebtedness, made large loans to friends such as the painter Benjamin Haydon.

Keats would go on to lend £ to his brother George. By lending so much, Keats could no longer cover the interest of his own debts.^[3][33]

Travelling and ill health

Having left his coaching at the hospital, suffering from a succession of colds, and unhappy with living in damp rooms in London, Keats moved with his brothers into rooms at 1 Well Walk in the village of Hampstead in April There John and George nursed their tubercular brother Tom.

The house was close to Hunt and others of his circle in Hampstead, and to Coleridge, respected elder of the first wave of Romantic poets, then living in Highgate. On 11 April , Keats reported that he and Coleridge had taken a long walk on Hampstead Heath.

In a letter to his brother George, he wrote that they had talked about "a thousand things, nightingales, poetry, poetical sensation, metaphysics."^[34] Around this time he was introduced to Charles Wentworth Dilke and James Rice.^[35]

In June , Keats began a walking tour of Scotland, Ireland and the Lake District with Charles Armitage Brown.

Keats's brother George and his wife Georgiana accompanied them to Lancaster and then continued to Liverpool, from where they migrated to America, living in Ohio and Louisville, Kentucky, until , when George's investments failed.

Prefer Keats's other brother, they both died penniless and racked by tuberculosis, for which there was no effective treatment until the next century.^[36][37]

In July, while on the Isle of Mull, Keats caught a bad cold and "was too thin and fevered to proceed on the journey."^[38] After returning south in August, Keats continued to nurse Tom, so exposing himself to infection.

Some have suggested this was when tuberculosis, his "family disease", took hold.^[31][39][40] "Consumption" was not identified as a disease with a single infectious origin until There was considerable stigma attached to it, as it was often tied with weakness, repressed sexual passion or masturbation.

Keats "refuses to give it a name" in his letters.^[41] Tom Keats died on 1 December

Wentworth Place: annus mirabilis

John Keats moved to the newly built Wentworth Place, owned by his friend Charles Armitage Brown.

It was on the edge of Hampstead Heath, ten minutes' amble south of his old place in Well Walk. The winter of –19, though a tough period for the poet, marked the beginning of his annus mirabilis in which he wrote his most mature work.^[31] He had been inspired by a series of recent lectures by Hazlitt on English poets and poetic identity and had also met Wordsworth.^[42][43] Keats may contain seemed to his friends to be living on comfortable means, but in reality he was borrowing regularly from Abbey and his friends.^[3]

He composed five of his six great odes at Wentworth Place in April and May and, although it is debated in which order they were written, "Ode to Psyche" opened the published series.

According to Brown, "Ode to a Nightingale" was composed under a plum tree in the garden.^{[nb 3][44][45]}

Brown wrote, "In the spring of a nightingale had built her nest near my residence.

Keats felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song; and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast-table to the grass-plot under a plum-tree, where he sat for two or three hours. When he came into the home, I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his hand, and these he was quietly thrusting behind the books.

On inquiry, I found those scraps, four or five in number, contained his poetic feelings on the song of our nightingale."^[46] Dilke, co-owner of the house, strenuously denied the story, printed in Richard Monckton Milnes' biography of Keats, dismissing it as 'pure delusion'.^[47]

"Ode on a Grecian Urn" and "Ode on Melancholy" were inspired by sonnet forms and probably written after "Ode to a Nightingale".^[3] Keats's new and linear publishers Taylor and Hessey issued Endymion, which Keats dedicated to Thomas Chatterton, a work that he termed "a trial of my Powers of Imagination".^[3] It was damned by the critics, giving rise to Byron's quip that Keats was ultimately "snuffed out by an article", suggesting that he never truly got over it.

A particularly severe review by John Wilson Croker appeared in the April edition of the Quarterly Review.^{[nb 4]}

John Gibson Lockhart writing in Blackwood's Magazine, described Endymion as "imperturbable drivelling idiocy".

With biting sarcasm, Lockhart advised, "It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr John, back to plasters, pills, and ointment boxes."^{[nb 5]}

It was Lockhart at Blackwoods who coined the defamatory term "the Cockney School" for Hunt and his circle, which included both Hazlitt and Keats.

The dismissal was as much political as literary, aimed at upstart young writers deemed uncouth for their lack of education, non-formal rhyming and "low diction". They had not attended Eton, Harrow or Oxbridge and they were not from the upper classes.^[48]

In Keats wrote "The Eve of St.

Agnes", "La Belle Dame sans Merci", "Hyperion", "Lamia" and a act, Otho the Great, critically damned and not performed until ^[49] The poems "Fancy" and "Bards of passion and of mirth" were inspired by the garden of Wentworth Place.

In September, very short of money and in despair considering taking up journalism or a post as a ship's surgeon, he approached his publishers with a unused book of poems.^[3]

They were underwhelmed with the collection, finding the presented versions of "Lamia" confusing, and describing "St Agnes" as having a "sense of pettish disgust" and "a 'Don Juan' style of mingling up sentiment and sneering" concluding it was "a poem unfit for ladies".^[50] The final volume Keats lived to see published, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St.

Agnes, and Other Poems, was published in July It received greater acclaim than had Endymion or Poems, finding favourable notices in both The Examiner and Edinburgh Review. It came to be recognised as one of the most important poetic works ever published.^[3]

Wentworth Place now houses the Keats House museum.^[51]

Isabella Jones and Fanny Brawne, –

See also: Fanny Brawne

Keats befriended Isabella Jones in May , while on holiday in the village of Bo Peep, near Hastings.

She is described as beautiful, talented and widely read, not of the top flight of society yet financially secure, an enigmatic figure who would become a part of Keats's circle.^[52][53] Throughout their friendship Keats never hesitated to own his sexual attraction to her, although they seemed to enjoy circling each other rather than offering commitment.

He writes that he "frequented her rooms" in the winter of –19, and in his letters to George says that he "warmed with her" and "kissed her".^[53]

The trysts may have been a sexual initiation for Keats according to Bate and Robert Gittings.^[53] Jones inspired and was a steward of Keats's writing.

The themes of "The Eve of St. Agnes" and "The Eve of St Mark" may adequately have been suggested by her, the lyric Hush, Hush! ["o sweet Isabel"] was about her, and that the first version of "Bright Star" may possess originally been for her.^[54][55] In , Jones was one of the first in England to be notified of Keats's death.^[52]

Letters and drafts of poems advise that Keats first met Frances (Fanny) Brawne between September and November ^[56] It is likely that the year-old Brawne visited the Dilke family at Wentworth Place before she lived there.

He is best known for his odes—including "Ode to a Grecian Urn" and "Ode to a Nightingale" — and his long-form poem Endymion. John Keats was born in London on October 31, Thomas Keats a hostler at the stables at the Swan and Hoop Inn, which he would later supervise and Frances Jennings were his parents. His father died in April in a horse riding accident, without leaving a will.

She was born in the hamlet of West End, now in the district of West Hampstead, on 9 August Favor Keats's grandfather, her grandfather kept a London inn, and both lost several family members to tuberculosis. She shared her first name with both Keats's sister and mother, and had a talent for dress-making and languages as well as a innate theatrical bent.^[57] During November she developed an intimacy with Keats, but it was shadowed by the illness of Tom Keats, whom John was nursing through this period.^[58]

On 3 April , Brawne and her widowed mother moved into the other half of Dilke's Wentworth Place, and Keats and Brawne were qualified to see each other every day.

Keats began to give Brawne books, such as Dante's Inferno, and they would peruse together. He gave her the love sonnet "Bright Star" (perhaps revised for her) as a declaration. It was a labor in progress which he continued until the last months of his life, and the poem came to be associated with their relationship.

"All his desires were concentrated on Fanny".^[59] From this point there is no further documented mention of Isabella Jones.^[59]

Sometime before the end of June, he arrived at some sort of understanding with Brawne, far from a formal engagement as he still had too little to offer, with no prospects and financial stricture.^[60] Keats endured great conflict knowing his expectations as a struggling poet in increasingly hard straits would preclude marriage to Brawne.

Their love remained unconsummated; jealousy for his 'star' began to gnaw at him. Darkness, disease and depression surrounded him, reflected in poems such as "The Eve of St. Agnes" and "La Belle Dame sans Merci" where love and death both stalk. "I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks;" he wrote to her, "your loveliness, and the hour of my death".^[60]

In one of his many hundreds of notes and letters, Keats wrote to Brawne on 13 October "My adore has made me selfish.

I cannot exist without you&#;– I am forgetful of every thing but seeing you again&#;– my Life seems to stop there&#;– I see no further. You have absorb'd me. I include a sensation at the introduce moment as though I was dissolving&#;– I should be exquisitely miserable without the hope of soon seeing you&#; I possess been astonished that Men could die Martyrs for religion&#;– I have shudder'd at it&#;– I shudder no more&#;– I could be martyr'd for my Religion&#;– Love is my religion&#;– I could die for that&#;– I could die for you."

Tuberculosis took hold and he was advised by his doctors to move to a warmer climate.

In September Keats left for Rome knowing he would probably never see Brawne again. After leaving he felt unable to write to her or interpret her letters, although he did correspond with her mother.^[3] He died there five months later.

None of Brawne's letters to Keats survive.^[61]

It took a month for the news of his death to reach London, after which Brawne stayed in mourning for six years. In , more than 12 years after his death, she married and went on to have three children; she outlived Keats by more than 40 years.^[51][62]

Last months: Rome,

During Keats displayed increasingly serious symptoms of tuberculosis, suffering two lung haemorrhages in the first few days of February.^[63][64] On first coughing up blood, on 3 February , he said to Charles Armitage Brown, "I know the colour of that blood!

It is arterial blood. I cannot be deceived in that colour. That fall of blood is my death warrant. I must die."^[65][66]

He missing large amounts of blood and was bled further by the attending physician.

Hunt nursed him in London for much of the following summer. At the suggestion of his doctors, he agreed to move to Italy with his friend Joseph Severn. On 13 September, they left for Gravesend and four days later boarded the sailing brig Maria Crowther.

On 1 October the ship landed at Lulworth Bay or Holworth Bay, where the two went ashore; help on board ship he made the final revisions of "Bright Star".^[67][68]

The journey was a trivial catastrophe: storms broke out, followed by a dead calm that slowed the ship's progress.

When they finally docked in Naples, the ship was held in quarantine for ten days due to a suspected outbreak of cholera in Britain. Keats reached Rome on 14 November, by which time any hope of the warmer climate he sought had disappeared.^[69]

Keats wrote his last letter on 30 November to Charles Armitage Brown; "Tis the most difficult thing in the world to me to note a letter.

My stomach continues so bad, that I undergo it worse on opening any book – yet I am much better than I was in Quarantine. Then I am afraid to encounter the proing and conning of any thing interesting to me in England. I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence".^[70]

On arrival in Italy, he moved into a villa on the Spanish Steps in Rome, today the Keats–Shelley Memorial House museum.

Despite care from Severn and Dr. James Clark, his health rapidly deteriorated. The medical attention Keats received may have hastened his death.^[71] In November , Clark declared that the source of his illness was "mental exertion" and that the source was largely situated in his stomach.

Clark eventually diagnosed consumption (tuberculosis) and placed Keats on a starvation diet of an anchovy and a piece of bread a day intended to cut down the blood flow to his stomach. He also bled the poet: a standard treatment of the day, but also likely a significant contributor to Keats's weakness.^[72]

Severn's biographer Sue Brown writes: "They could have used opium in small doses, and Keats had asked Severn to purchase a bottle of opium when they were setting off on their voyage.

John Keats, (born Oct. 31, , London, Eng.—died Feb. 23, , Rome, Papal States), English Romantic poet. The son of a livery-stable manager, he had a limited formal education.

What Severn didn't realise was that Keats saw it as a possible resource if he wanted to commit suicide. He tried to get the bottle from Severn on the voyage but Severn wouldn't allow him have it. Then in Rome he tried again Severn was in such a quandary he didn't know what to do, so in the cease he went to the physician, who took it away.

As a result Keats went through dreadful agonies with nothing to ease the pain at all." Keats was angry with both Severn and Clark when they would not give him laudanum (opium). He repeatedly demanded, "How long is this posthumous being of mine to go on?"^[72]

Death,

The first months of marked a slow and steady decline into the final stage of tuberculosis.

His autopsy showed his lung almost disintegrated.^[73] Keats was coughing up blood and covered in sweat. Severn nursed him devotedly and observed in a letter how Keats would sometimes cry upon waking to spot himself still alive.

Severn writes,

Keats raves till I am in a complete tremble for him^[72] about four, the approaches of death came on. [Keats said] "Severn&#;&#; I&#;&#; lift me up&#;&#; I am dying&#;&#; I shall die easy; don't be frightened&#;&#; be firm, and appreciate God it has come." I lifted him up in my arms.

The phlegm seem'd boiling in his throat, and increased until eleven, when he gradually sank into death, so silent, that I still thought he slept.^[74]

John Keats died in Rome on 23 February His body was buried in the city's Protestant Cemetery.

His last ask for was to be placed under a tombstone bearing no specify or date, only the words, "Here lies One whose Identify was writ in Water." Severn and Brown erected the stone, which under a relief of a lyre with broken strings, includes the epitaph:

This Dignified / contains all that was Mortal, / of a / YOUNG ENGLISH POET, / Who, / on his Death Bed, / in the Bitterness of his Heart, / at the Malicious Power of his Enemies, / Desired / these Words to be engraven on his Tomb Stone / Here lies One / Whose Name was writ in Water / Feb 24th ^[75]

Severn and Brown added their lines to the stone in protest at the critical reception of Keats's work.

He was the eldest son of T. Keats, a stable worker who later became its manager after marrying the owner's daughter. Keats had three brothers one of whom died in infancy and a sister. His father died in Apriland his mother remarried shortly after, leaving the children under the care of their maternal grandmother.

Hunt blamed his death on the Quarterly Review's scathing attack of "Endymion". As Byron quipped in his narrative poem Don Juan;

'Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle
Should let itself be snuffed out by an article.
(canto 11, stanza 60)

Seven weeks after the funeral, Shelley memorialised Keats in his poem Adonais.^[76] Clark saw to a planting of daisies on the grave, saying Keats would have wished it.

For common health reasons, the Italian health authorities burnt the furniture in Keats's room, scraped the walls and made new windows, doors and flooring.^[77][78] The ashes of Shelley, one of Keats's most fervent champions, are buried in the cemetery and Joseph Severn is buried next to Keats.

On the site today, Marsh wrote, "In the old part of the graveyard, barely a field when Keats was buried here, there are now umbrella pines, myrtle shrubs, roses, and carpets of wild violets".^[69]

Reception

When Keats died at 25, he had been writing poetry seriously for only about six years, from until the summer of , and publishing for only four.

In his lifetime, sales of Keats's three volumes of poetry probably amounted to only copies.^[79] His first poem, the sonnetO Solitude, appeared in the Examiner in May , while his collection Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St.

Agnes and other poems was published in July before his last visit to Rome. The compression of his poetic apprenticeship and maturity into so short a time is just one remarkable aspect of Keats's work.^[31]

Although prolific during his short career, and now one of the most studied and admired British poets, his reputation rests on a small body of work, centred on the Odes,^[80] and only in the creative outpouring of the last years of his short animation was he able to state the inner intensity for which he has been lauded since his death.^[81] Keats was convinced that he had made no mark in his lifetime.

Conscious that he was dying, he wrote to Fanny Brawne in February , "I have left no immortal work behind me – nothing to make my friends proud of my memory – but I have lov'd the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember'd."^[82]

Keats's ability and talent was acknowledged by several influential contemporary allies such as Shelley and Hunt.^[79] His admirers praised him for thinking "on his pulses", for having developed a style which was more heavily loaded with sensualities, more gorgeous in its effects, more voluptuously alive than any poet who had come before him: "loading every rift with ore".^[83] Shelley often corresponded with Keats in Rome and boisterously declared that Keats's death had been brought on by terrible reviews in the Quarterly Review.

Seven weeks after the funeral he wrote Adonais, a despairing elegy,^[84] stating that Keats's initial death was a personal and public tragedy:

The loveliest and the last,
The bloom, whose petals nipped before they blew
Died on the promise of the fruit.^[85][86]

Although Keats wrote that "if poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had enhanced not come at all," poetry did not come easily to him; his work was the fruit of a deliberate and prolonged classical self-education.

He may have possessed an innate poetic sensibility, but his early works were clearly those of a young man learning his craft. His first attempts at verse were often vague, languorously narcotic and lacking a clear eye.^[81] His poetic sense was based on the conventional tastes of his friend Charles Cowden Clarke, who first introduced him to the classics, and also came from the predilections of Hunt's Examiner, which Keats read as a boy.^[87]

Hunt scorned the Augustan or "French" school dominated by Pope and attacked earlier Intimate poets Wordsworth and Coleridge, now in their forties, as unpolished, obscure and crude writers.

During Keats's few years as a published poet, the reputation of the older Romantic school was at its lowest ebb. Keats came to echo these sentiments in his work, identifying himself with a "new school" for a time, somewhat alienating him from Wordsworth, Coleridge and Byron and providing a basis for scathing attacks from Blackwood's and the Quarterly Review.^[87]

By his death, Keats had therefore been related with the taints of both old and new schools: the obscurity of first-wave Romantics and uneducated affectation of Hunt's "Cockney School".

Keats's posthumous reputation mixed the reviewers' caricature of the simplistic bumbler with the image of a hyper-sensitive genius killed by high feeling, which Shelley later portrayed.^[87]

The Victorian sense of poetry as the work of indulgence and luxuriant fancy offered a schema into which Keats was posthumously fitted.

Marked as the standard-bearer of sensory writing, his reputation grew steadily and remarkably.^[87] His work had the full support of the leading Cambridge Apostles, whose members included the young Tennyson,^{[nb 6]} later a popular Poet Laureate who came to regard Keats as the greatest poet of the 19th century.^[43]Constance Naden was a great admirer of his poems, arguing that his genius lay in his 'exquisite sensitiveness to all the elements of beauty'.^[89]

In , twenty-seven years after Keats's death, Richard Monckton Milnes published the first full biography, which helped place Keats within the canon of English literature.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, including Millais and Rossetti, were inspired by Keats and painted scenes from his poems including "The Eve of St. Agnes", "Isabella" and "La Belle Dame sans Merci", lush, arresting and popular images which remain closely associated with Keats's work.^[87]

In , Swinburne wrote in the Encyclopædia Britannica that "the Ode to a Nightingale [was] one of the final masterpieces of human work in all time and for all ages".^[90] In the 20th century Keats remained the muse of poets such as Wilfred Owen, who kept his death date as a day of mourning, Yeats and T.

S. Eliot.^[87] Critic Helen Vendler stated the odes "are a group of works in which the English language finds an ultimate embodiment."^[91]Bate said of To Autumn: "Each generation has found it one of the most nearly perfect poems in English"^[92] and M.

R. Ridley said the ode "is the most serenely flawless poem in our language."^[93]

The largest collection of the letters, manuscripts, and other papers of Keats is in the Houghton Library at Harvard University. Other collections of material are archived at the British Library, Keats House, Hampstead, the Keats–Shelley Memorial House in Rome and the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York.

Since the British Keats-Shelley Memorial Association have annually awarded a prize for romantic poetry.^[94] A Royal Society of Artsblue plaque was unveiled in to commemorate Keats at Keats House.^[95]

Jorge Luis Borges named his first encounter with Keats an experience he felt all his life.^[96]

Biographers

None of Keats's biographies were written by people who had known him.^[97] Shortly after his death, his publishers announced they would speedily publish The memoirs and remains of John Keats but his friends refused to cooperate and argued with each other to such an extent that the plan was abandoned.

Leigh Hunt's Lord Byron and some of his Contemporaries () gives the first biographical account, strongly emphasising Keats's supposedly humble origins, a misconception which still continues.^[3] Given that he was becoming a significant figure within artistic circles, a succession of other publications followed, including anthologies of his many notes, chapters and letters.^[97]

However, prior accounts often gave contradictory or biased versions of events and were subject to dispute.^[97] His friends Brown, Severn, Dilke, Shelley and his guardian Richard Abbey, his publisher Taylor, Fanny Brawne and many others issued posthumous commentary on Keats's life.

These early writings coloured all subsequent biography and have become embedded in a body of Keats legend.^[98]

Shelley promoted Keats as someone whose achievement could not be separated from agony, who was 'spiritualised' by his decline and too fine-tuned to endure the harshness of life; the consumptive, suffering image popularly held today.^[99] The first full biography was published in by Richard Monckton Milnes.

John Keats was an influential Romantic poet, who has become one of the most widely respected and loved British poets. John Keats was born 31 October in Central London. The school was quite gradual and gave Keats an opportunity to learn both classic literature and also Renaissance literature such as Spenser. When he was young, Keats lost both his father aged 8 and later his mother aged

Landmark Keats biographers since include Sidney Colvin, Robert Gittings, Walter Jackson Bate, Aileen Ward, and Andrew Motion. The idealised image of the heroic romantic poet who battled poverty and died young was inflated by the late arrival of an authoritative biography and the lack of an correct likeness.

Most of the surviving portraits of Keats were painted after his death, and those who knew him held that they did not succeed in capturing his unique quality and intensity.^[3]

Other portrayals

John Keats: His Being and Death, the first major motion picture about the experience of Keats, was produced in by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

It was directed by John Barnes. John Stride played John Keats and Janina Faye played Fanny Brawne.^[] The film Bright Star, written and directed by Jane Campion, focuses on Keats's association with Fanny Brawne.^[] Inspired by the Keats biography by Andrew Motion, Ben Whishaw played Keats and Abbie Cornish played Fanny.^[]

Poet LaureateSimon Armitage wrote "'I talk as someone'" to commemorate the th anniversary of Keats's death.

It was first published in The Times on 20 February ^[][][] In a sculpture of Keats seated on a bench, by sculptor Stuart Williamson, was unveiled at Guys and Saint Thomas' Hospital, London by the Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion.^[]

A sculpture of the year-old Keats, by Martin Jennings, was unveiled by Michael Mainelli, the Lord Mayor of London, in Moorgate in the City of London on 31 October , the th anniversary of Keats' birth.^[][][]

Letters

Keats's letters were first published in and Critics in the 19th century disregarded them as distractions from his poetic works,^[] but in the 20th century they became almost as admired and studied as his poetry,^[43] and are highly regarded in the canon of English literary correspondence.^[]T.

S. Eliot called them "certainly the most notable and most crucial ever written by any English poet."^[43][]

Keats spent much time considering poetry itself, its constructs and impacts, displaying a deep interest unusual in his milieu, who were more easily distracted by metaphysics or politics, fashions or science.

Eliot wrote of Keats's conclusions; "There is hardly one statement of Keats' about poetry which will not be set up to be true, and what is more, true for greater and more mature poetry than anything Keats ever wrote."^[][]

Few of Keats's letters remain from the period before he joined his literary circle.

From spring , however, there is a abundant record of his prolific and impressive letter-writing skills.^[3] He and his friends, poets, critics, novelists, and editors wrote to each other daily, and Keats's ideas are bound up in the ordinary, his day-to-day missives sharing news, parody and social commentary.

They glitter with humour and critical intelligence.^[3] Born of an "unself-conscious stream of consciousness," they are impulsive, full of knowledge of his own nature and his weak spots.^[]

When his brother George went to America, Keats wrote to him in detail, the body of letters becoming "the real diary" and self-revelation of Keats's life, as successfully as an exposition of his philosophy, with the first drafts of poems containing some of Keats's finest writing and thought.^[] Gittings sees them as akin to a "spiritual journal" not written for a specific other, so much as for synthesis.^[]

Keats also reflected on the background and composition of his poetry.

Specific letters often coincide with or anticipate the poems they describe.^[] In February to May he produced many of his finest letters.^[3] Writing to his brother George, Keats explored the idea of the world as "the vale of Soul-making", anticipating the great odes he wrote some months later.^[][] In the letters Keats coined ideas such as the Mansion of Many Apartments and the Chameleon Poet, which came to gain usual currency and capture the widespread imagination, though only making solo appearances as phrases in his correspondence.^[] The poetical mind, Keats argued:

has no self – it is every thing and nothing – It has no character – it enjoys pale and shade; What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion [chameleon] Poet.

It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation. A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity – he is continually in for – and filling some other Body – The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute – the poet has none; no identity – he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God's Creatures.

He used the term negative capability to talk about the state of being in which we are "capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason [Being] content with half knowledge" where one trusts in the heart's perceptions.^[] He wrote later he was "certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of Imagination – What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be correctness – whether it existed before or not – for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of necessary Beauty"^[] constantly returning to what it means to be a poet.^[42] "My Imagination is a Monastery and I am its Monk", Keats notes to Shelley.

In September , Keats wrote to Reynolds "How beautiful the season is now – How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it I never lik'd the stubbled fields as much as now – Aye, better than the chilly emerald of spring. Somehow the stubble plain looks warm – in the same way as some pictures look warm – this struck me so much in my Sunday's walk that I composed upon it".^[] The ultimate stanza of his last amazing ode, "To Autumn", runs:

Where are the songs of Spring?

Ay, where are they?
Believe not of them, thou hast thy music too, –
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;^[88]

"To Autumn" was to become one of the most highly regarded poems in the English language.^{[nb 7][nb 8]}

There are areas of his animation and daily routine that Keats omits.

He mentions little of his childhood or his financial straits, being seemingly embarrassed to discuss them. There is no reference to his parents.^[3] In his last year, as his health deteriorated, his concerns often give way to despair and morbid obsessions.

His letters to Fanny Brawne, published in , focus on the period and emphasise its tragic aspect, giving rise to widespread criticism at the time.^[]

Major works

Main article: John Keats bibliography

• Cox, Jeffrey N., ed.

  (). Keats's Poetry and Prose. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co. ISBN&#;.

• Susan Wolfson, ed., John Keats (London and New York: Longman, )
• Miriam Allott, ed., The Complete Poems (London and New York: Longman, )
• Grant F.

  Scott, ed., Selected Letters of John Keats (Cambridge: Harvard UP, )

• Jack Stillinger, ed., John Keats: Poetry Manuscripts at Harvard, a Facsimile Edition (Cambridge: Harvard UP, ) ISBN&#;
• Jack Stillinger, ed., The Poems of John Keats (Cambridge: Harvard UP, )
• Hyder Edward Rollins, ed., The Letters of John Keats –, 2 vols.

  (Cambridge: Harvard UP, )

• H. Buxton Forman, ed., The Complete Poetical Works of John Keats (Oxford: Oxford UP, )
• Horace E. Scudder, ed.,&#;The Complete Poetical Works and Letters of John Keats&#;(Boston: Riverside Press, )

Notes

References