Keats, John

Keats, John (1795-1821), English poet, one of the most gifted of the 19th century and an influential figure in the Romantic movement.

Keats was born in London, on October 31, 1795, the son of a livery stable owner. He was educated at the Clarke School, Enfield, and at the age of 15 was apprenticed to a surgeon. Subsequently, from 1814 to 1816, Keats studied medicine in London hospitals; in 1816 he became a licensed pharmacist but never practised his profession, deciding instead to be a poet.

Keats had already written a translation of the Aeneid and some verse by Virgil; his first published poems (1816) were the sonnets “O Solitude! If I Must with Thee Dwell” and “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”, inspired by his reading of the classic 17th-century translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey by George Chapman. Both poems appeared in the Examiner, a literary periodical edited by the essayist and poet Leigh Hunt, one of the champions of the Romantic movement in English literature. Hunt introduced Keats to a circle of literary people, including the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley; the group’s influence enabled Keats to see his first volume published, Poems by John Keats (1817). The principal poems in the volume were the sonnet on Chapman’s Homer, the sonnet “To One Who Has Been Long in City Pent”, “I Stood Tip-Toe upon a Little Hill”, and “Sleep and Poetry”, which defended the principles of Romanticism as promulgated by Hunt, and attacked the practice of Romanticism as represented by the poet George Gordon, Lord Byron.

Keats’s second volume, Endymion, was published in 1818. Adapting the myth of Endymion and the Moon goddess, the poem expresses the attempt to find in reality an ideal love seen only in dreams. It was attacked by two of the most influential critical magazines of the time, the Quarterly Review and Blackwood’s Magazine. 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. Keats’s early death was attributed by some of his admirers to the hostility he suffered at the hands of reviewers.

In 1820 Keats became ill with tuberculosis. The illness may have been aggravated by the emotional strain of his attachment to Fanny Brawne, a young woman with whom he had fallen passionately in love and to whom he had become engaged in 1819. Nevertheless, the period from 1818 to 1820 was one of great creativity. In July 1820, the third and best of his volumes of poetry, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems, was published. The three title poems, dealing with mythical and legendary themes of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance times, are sumptuous in their imagery and phrasing. The volume also includes the unfinished poem “Hyperion”, containing some of Keats’s finest work, the lyric masterpiece “To Autumn”, and three odes considered among the finest in the English language, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, “Ode on Melancholy”, and “Ode to a Nightingale”, which deal with the themes of the eternal and transcendental nature of ideals compared to the transience of the physical world.

In the autumn of 1820, under his doctor’s orders to seek a warm climate for the winter, Keats went to Rome. He died there on February 23, 1821, and was buried in the Protestant cemetery. Some of his best-known poems were published posthumously, including “Eve of St Mark” (1848) and “La Belle Dame sans Merci” (1888). Keats’s letters, praised by many critics as among the most interesting and well-written literary letters composed in English, were published in their most complete form in 1931; a later edition appeared in 1960.

Although Keats’s career was short, critics agree that he has a lasting place in the history of English and world literature. Characterized by exact and closely knit construction, sensual descriptions, and force of imagination, his poetry gives transcendental value to the physical beauty of the world.