My Hero - John Keats (1795 - 1821)

Portrait of John Keats by William Hilton, after Joseph Severn (National Portrait Gallery, London)

A Brief Biography

John Keats was born in Finsbury Pavement near London on October 31st, 1795. The first son of a stable-keeper, he had a sister and three brothers, one of whom died in infancy (Edward, died in infancy, April 28, 1801). When John was eight years old, his father, Thomas Keats, was killed in a riding accident (Fell from his horse as he rode home at night from Southgate on April 16, 1804). In the same year his mother, Frances Jennings Keats married again, but little later separated from her husband (William Rawlings) and took her children, John and his sister Fanny and bothers George and Tom, to live with her mother at Edmonton, near London. John attended a good school where he became well acquainted with ancient and contemporary literature.

At school Keats read widely. He was educated at the progressive Clarke's School in Enfield, where he began a translation of the Aeneid. Keats, who was barely five feet tall, was not known at school for his enthusiasm for books, but his fighting. "My mind has been the most discontented and restless one that ever was put into a body too small for it," he wrote.

In February 1810 his mother died of tuberculosis, leaving the children to their grandmother. John Keats was only fourteen. After his mother’s death, the old lady put them under the care of two guardians, two London merchants, Richard Abbey and John Rowland Sandell, to whom she made over a respectable amount of money for the benefit of the orphans. Abbey, a prosperous tea broker, assumed the bulk of this responsibility, while Sandell played only a minor role.

Under the authority of the guardians, at the age of fifteen, 1811, Abbey withdrew him from the Clarke School, Enfield, to apprentice with an apothecary-surgeon and study medicine in a London hospital. While studying for the licence, he completed his translation of Aeneid. Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene impressed him deeply and his first poem, written in 1814, was 'Lines in Imitation of Spenser.'

In 1814, before completion of his apprenticeship, John left his master after a quarrel, becoming a hospital student in London. Although he became a licensed apothecary in 1816, but he never practiced his profession, deciding instead to write poetry. Under the guidance of his friend Cowden Clarke he devoted himself increasingly to literature. In London he had met Leigh Hunt, the editor of the leading liberal magazine of the day, The Examiner.

He introduced Keats to other young Romantics, including Percy B. Shelley, William Wordsworth and Benjamin Robert Haydon. In May 1816, Hunt helped him published his sonnet, "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" and 'O Solitude' in the magazine. The group's influence enabled Keats to see his first volume, Poems (about thirty poems and sonnets) 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. Sales were poor. After receiving scarce, negative feedback, Keats travelled to the Isle of Wight on his own in spring of 1817. In the late summer he went to Oxford together with a newly-made friend, Benjamin Bailey.

In the following winter, George Keats married and moved to America, leaving the consumptuous brother Tom to John's care. He spent the spring with his brother Tom and friends at Shankin. It was about this time Keats started to use his letters as the vehicle of his thoughts of poetry. They mixed the everyday events of his own life with comments with his correspondence.

Apart from helping Tom against consumption, Keats worked on his poem "Endymion" his first long poem appeared when he was 21. It told in 4000 lines of the love of the moon goddess Cynthia for the young shepherd Endymion.

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.

Miniature portrait of Fanny Brawne

Just before its publication, John Keats went on a hiking tour to Scotland and Ireland with his friend Charles Brown (summer of 1818.). First signs of his own fatal disease forced him to return prematurely, where he found his brother seriously ill from tuberculosis and his poem harshly criticized.

In December 1818 Tom Keats died. John moved to Hampstead Heath, were he lived in the house of Charles Brown. While in Scotland with Keats, Brown had lent his house to a Mrs Brawne and her sixteen-year-old daughter Fanny. Since the ladies where still living in London, Keats soon made their acquaintance and fell in love with the beautiful, fashionable girl, Fanny Brawne.

That same autumn in 1818, Keats contracted tuberculosis. In the winter of 1818-19 he worked mainly on Hyperion and The Eve of St Agnes. The fragmentary Eve of St Mark was composed during a visit to his friend Charles Wentworth Dilke's parents and relatives in Sussex.

In 1819 Keats finished Lamia, and wrote another version of Hyperion, called The Fall of Hyperion (unpublished until 1856). His famous poem 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' was inspired by a Wedgwood copy of a Roman copy of a Greek vase. Josiah Wedgwood's copy was purchased by Sir William Hamilton, who sold it to the duchess of Portland. She denoted the vase to the British Museum in 1784.

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 could not enjoy the positive resonance on the publication of the volume "Lamia, Isabella &c.", including his most celebrated odes.

His poems were marked with sadness partly because he was too poor to marry Fanny Brawne. Keats broke off his engagement and began what he called a "posthumous existence." However he continued to correspondence with Fanny Brawne and—when he could no longer bear to write to her directly—her mother.

In the late summer of 1820, Keats was ordered by his doctors to avoid the English winter and move to Italy. Keats had been experiencing ill health and it was thought that the warmer air of Italy would help cure him. His friend the painter, Joseph Severn accompanied him south - first to Naples, and then to Rome. His health improved momentarily, only to collapse finally.

Keats died in Rome of tuberculosis on February 23rd, 1821. John Keats was only 26 years old when he died.

He was buried on the Protestant Cemetery, near the grave of Caius Cestius. On his desire, the following lines were engraved on his tombstone: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water."

Note: Keats did not invent his own epitaph, but remembered words from the play Philaster, or Love Lies-Ableeding, written by Beaumont and Fletcher in 1611. "All your better deeds / Shall be in water writ," one of the characters says. Keats told his friend Joseph Severn that he wanted on his grave just the line, "Here lies one whose name was writ in water."

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So who is your favourite poet? :)