JOHN KEATES

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John Keats (pronounced /kits/; 31October 1795 23 February 1821) was the lastborn of the English Romantic poets and, at 25,

the youngest to die.[1] Along with Lord Byronand Percy Bysshe Shelley, he was one of the keyfigures in the second generation of the Romanticmovement, despite the fact that his work hadbeen in publication for only four years before his

death.[1]

During his life, his poems were notgenerally well received by critics; however, hisreputation grew and he held significantposthumous influence on many later poets,including Alfred Tennyson andWilfred Owen.

The poetry of Keats is characterised by sensualimagery, most notably in the series ofodes.Today his poems and letters are considered asamong the most popular and analysed in Englishliterature.


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EARLY LIFE

y John Keats was born on 31 October 1795 toThomas and Frances Jennings Keats. He was theeldest of their four surviving children, George

(17971841), Thomas (17991818), andFrances Mary "Fanny" (180389). A son wasalso lost in infancy. John was born in centralLondon, although there is no clear evidence ofthe exact location.[2] His father at first worked asan ostler[3] at the stables attached to the Swan

and Hoop inn, an establishment Thomas latermanaged and where the growing family wouldlive for some years. The Keats at the Globe pubnow occupies the site, a few yards from modernday Moorgate station. Keats was baptised at StBotolph-without-Bishopsgate and sent to a local

dame school as an infant. In the summer of1803, unable to attend Eton or Harrow due tothe expense, [4][5] he was sent to board at JohnClarke's school in Enfield, close to hisgrandparents' house.


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y The headmaster's son, Charles Cowden Clarke,

would become an important influence, mentor andfriend, introducing Keats to Renaissance literatureincludingTasso, Spenser and Chapman'stranslations. In April 1804, when Keats was eight,his father was killed, fracturing his skull after fallingfrom his horse on a return visit to the school.

Thomas died intestate. Frances remarried twomonths later, but left her new husband soonafterwards, her four children going to live with thechildren's grandmother, Alice Jennings, in thevillage ofEdmonton.[6] In March 1810, when Keatswas 14, his mother died of tuberculosis, leaving thechildren in the custody of their grandmother whoappointed two guardians to take care of thechildren. That autumn, Keats was removed fromClarke's school to apprentice with ThomasHammond, a surgeon and apothecary, lodging in

the attic above the surgery until 1813. CowdenClarke, who remained a close friend of Keats,described this as the most placid time in Keats'slife".[7]


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y Keats's first surviving poem, An Imitation ofSpenser, was written in 1814, when Keats was19. In 1815, Keats registered as a medical

student at Guy's Hospital (now part ofKing'sCollege London). Within a month of starting, hewas accepted for a dressership position withinthe hospital, a significant promotion withincreased responsibility and workload. This took

up his writing time and increased hisambivalence to working in medicine.[8] Stronglydrawn by ambition inspired by fellow poets suchas Leigh Hunt and Byron, and beleaguered byfamily financial crises that continued to the end

of his life, he suffered periods of depression. Hisbrother George wrote that John "feared that heshould never be a poet, & if he was not he woulddestroy himself".


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WENTWORTH PLACE

John Keats moved to the newly builtWentworth Place, owned by his friendCharles Armitage Brown, also on the edge ofHampstead Heath, a ten-minute walk southof his old home in Well Walk. This winter of1817-18, though troubled, marks thebeginning of Keats's annus mirabilis in which

he wrote his most mature work.[1] He hadbeen greatly inspired by a series of recentlectures by Hazlitt on English poets andpoetic identity and met withWordsworth.

[23] In December he attended Haydon'simmortal dinner, along with Wordsworthand Charles Lamb. [24]


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Keats composed five of his six great odes there inApril and May and, although it is debated in

which order they were written,Ode to Psyche

starts the series. According to Brown, Ode to aNightingale was composed under a mulberrytree in the garden.[25][26] Brown wrote, "In thespring of 1819 a nightingale had built her nest

near my house. Keats felt a tranquil andcontinual joy in her song; and one morning hetook his chair from the breakfast-table to thegrass-plot under a plum-tree, where he sat fortwo or three hours. When he came into the

house, I perceived he had some scraps of paperin his hand, and these he was quietly thrustingbehind the books. On inquiry, I found thosescraps, four or five in number, contained hispoetic feelings on the song of ournightingale.[27]Dilke, co-owner of the house,strenuously denied the story, printed in Milnes'1848 biography of Keats, dismissing it as puredelusion.


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y He was bound apprentice some years ago to a worthyapothecary in town. But all has been undone by a suddenattack of the malady [...] For some time we were in hopes thathe might get off with a violent fit or two; but of late the

symptoms are terrible. The phrenzy of the "Poems" was badenough in its way; but it did not alarm us half so seriously asthe calm, settled, imperturbable drivelling idiocy ofEndymion.[...] It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecarythan a starved poet; so back to the [apothecary] shop Mr John,back to plasters, pills, and ointment boxes. [29] It wasLockhart at Blackwoods who had coined the defamatory term"the Cockney School" for Hunt and his circle, includingWilliam Hazlitt and, squarely, Keats. The dismissal was asmuch political as literaryaimed at upstart young writersdeemed uncouth for their lack of education, non-formalrhyming and "low diction". They had not attended Eton,Harrow or Oxbridge colleges and they were not from theupper classes.


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DEATHy During 1820, Keats displayed increasingly

serious symptoms oftuberculosis, to the extentthat he suffered two lung haemorrhages in thefirst few days of February.[41][42] He lost largeamounts of blood and was bled further by theattending physician. Hunt nursed him in Londonfor much of the summer. At the suggestion of hisdoctors, he agreed to move to Italy with hisfriend Joseph Severn. On 13 September, they

left for Gravesend and four days later boardedthe sailing brig The Maria Crowther. Keats wrotehis final revisions of "Bright Star" aboard theship. The journey was a minor catastrophe:storms broke out followed by a dead calm thatslowed the ships progress. When it finally

docked in Naples, the ship was held inquarantine for ten days because of a suspectedoutbreak ofcholera in Britain. Keats reachedRome on November 14 by which time all hopeof a warmer climate had evaporated.[43]


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y On arrival in Italy, he moved into a villa on the SpanishSteps in Rome, today the Keats-Shelley Memorial Housemuseum. Despite care from Severn and Dr. James Clark,

his health rapidly deteriorated. The medical attentionKeats received may have hastened his death.[44] InNovember 1820, Clark declared that the source of hisillness was "mental exertion" and that the source waslargely situated in his stomach. Clark eventuallydiagnosed consumption (tuberculosis) and placed Keatson a starvation diet of an anchovy and a piece of bread aday intended to reduce the blood flow to his stomach.He also bled the poet; a standard treatment of the day,but was likely a significant contributor to Keats'sweakness.


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y He died on 23 February 1821 and was buried in theProtestant Cemetery, Rome. His last request was tobe placed under a unnamed tombstone which

contained only the words (in pentameter), "Herelies one whose name was writ in water." Severn andBrown erected the stone, which under a relief of alyre with broken strings, contains the epitaph:

y This Grave / contains all that was Mortal / of a /Young English Poet / Who / on his Death Bed, inthe Bitterness of his Heart / at the Malicious Powerof his Enemies / Desired / these Words to be /engraven on his Tomb Stone: / Here lies One / WhoseName was writ in Water24 February 1821


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JOHN KEATES

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