John Keats

by abdo Wed Apr 06, 2011 3:34 pm

John
Keats

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

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Portrait
of John Keats by William
Hilton. [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], London

John Keats (pronounced [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]; 31 October 1795 – 23
February 1821) was an English [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] poet. Along with [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
he was one of the key figures in the second generation of the Romantic
movement, despite the fact that his work had been in publication for only four
years before his death.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
During his life, his poems were not generally well received by critics;
however, after his death, his reputation grew to the extent that by the end of
the 19th century he had become one of the most beloved of all English poets. He
has had a significant influence on a diverse range of later poets and writers: [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
for instance, stated that his first encounter with Keats was the most
significant literary experience of his life.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

The poetry of Keats is characterized
by sensual imagery, most notably in the series of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]. Today his poems and letters are some
of the most popular and analyzed in English literature.

Biography

Early life

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Life
mask of Keats by Benjamin
Haydon, 1816

John Keats was born on 31 October
1795 to Thomas and Frances Jennings Keats. He was the eldest of their four
surviving children, George (1797–1841), Thomas (1799–1818), and Frances Mary
"Fanny" (1803–89). A son was also lost in infancy. John was born in
central London,
although there is no clear evidence of the exact location.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]} His
father at first worked as a [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]} at the
stables attached to the Swan and Hoop inn, an establishment Thomas later
managed and where the growing family would live for some years. The Keats at
the Globe pub now occupies the site, a few yards from modern day [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].
Keats was baptised at St
Botolph-without-Bishopsgate and sent to a local [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] as an infant.
In the summer of 1803, unable to attend [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
or [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
due to the expense,^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]} he was
sent to board at John Clarke's school in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
close to his grandparents' house. The small school had a liberal and
progressive outlook, with a curriculum ahead of its time, a place altogether
more modern than the larger, more prestigious schools. ^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
In the family atmosphere at Clarke's, Keats developed an interest in classics
and history which would stay with him throughout his short life. The
headmaster's son, Charles Cowden Clarke, would become an important influence,
mentor and friend, introducing Keats to [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] literature
including [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
and Chapman's
translations. The instability of Keats's childhood gave rise to a volatile
character "always in extremes", given to indolence and fighting.
However at 13 he began focusing his energy towards reading and study, winning
his first academic prize in midsummer 1809. ^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

In April 1804, when Keats was
eight, his father was killed, fracturing his skull after falling from his horse
on a return visit to the school. Thomas died [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]. Frances remarried two months later, but left her
new husband soon afterwards, her four children going to live with the
children's grandmother, Alice Jennings, in the village of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]} In
March 1810, when Keats was 14, his mother died of tuberculosis leaving the
children in the custody of their grandmother who appointed two guardians to
take care of the children. That autumn, Keats was removed from Clarke's school
to apprentice with Thomas Hammond, a surgeon and apothecary, lodging in the
attic above the surgery until 1813. Cowden Clarke, who remained a close friend
of Keats, described this as "the most placid time in Keats's life".^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

Early career

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific — and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise —
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

“

”

The sonnet
"On First Looking into Chapman's Homer"
October 1816

Having finished his
apprenticeship with Hammond,
Keats registered as a medical student at [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] (now
part of King's
College London) and began there in October 1815. Within a month of
starting, he was accepted for a dressership position within the hospital, the
equivalent of a junior house surgeon. It was significant promotion marking a
distinct talent for medicine, the role coming with increased responsibility and
workload. His long and expensive medial training with Hammond and at Guys gave his family to assume
this would be his lifelong career, assuring financial security. ^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

Keats's first surviving poem,
An Imitation of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], was written in 1814, when Keats was 19.
His medical career took up increasing amounts of his writing time and
exacerbated his ambivalence to anything other than poetry.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
Strongly drawn by ambition inspired by fellow poets such as [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], and beleaguered by
family financial crises that continued to the end of his life, 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".^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]} In
1816, Keats received his apothecary's licence but before the end of the year he
announced to his guardian that he had resolved to be a poet, not a surgeon.
Though he continued his work and training at Guy's, Keats was devoting
increasing time to the study of literature. In May 1816, Leigh Hunt agreed to
publish the sonnet O Solitude in his magazine The [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], a leading
liberal magazine of the day.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
It is the first appearance of Keats's poems in print and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
refers to it as his friend's red letter day,^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
first proof that Keats's ambitions were valid. In the summer of that year he
went down to the coastal town of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
with Clarke to write. There he began Calidore and initiated the era of
his great letter writing.

In October, Clarke introduced
Keats to the influential Hunt, a close friend of Byron and Shelley. Five months
later Poems, the first volume of Keats verse, was published, which
included "I stood tiptoe" and "Sleep and Poetry".^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
It was a critical failure, arousing no interest, his publishers feeling ashamed
of the book. ^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
Still, Hunt went on to publish the essay Three Young Poets (Shelley,
Keats and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]), along with the sonnet "[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],"
promising great things to come.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]} He
introduced Keats to many prominent men in his circle, including editor of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], writer [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], conductor [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and
poet John
Hamilton Reynolds, who would become a close friend.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]} It
was a decisive turning point for Keats, establishing him in the public eye as a
figure in, what Hunt termed, 'a new school of poetry'.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]} At
this time Keats writes 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".^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]} This
would eventually transmute into the concluding lines of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
" 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' – that is all / you know on earth, and
all ye need to know".

In bad health and unhappy
with living in London,
Keats moved with his brothers into rooms at 1 Well Walk in April 1817. Both
John and George nursed their brother Tom, who was suffering from [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]. The house in
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] was close to
Hunt and others from his circle, as well as the senior poet [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] who at the time lived in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]} In
June 1818, Keats began a walking journey around Scotland,
Ireland and the Lake
district with his friend Charles Armitage
Brown. George and his wife Georgina accompanied them as far as [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and then headed to [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], from where the
couple would emigrate to America.
They lived in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
until 1841 when George's investments went bad. Like both of Keats's brothers,
they died penniless and racked by tuberculosis. There would be no effective
treatment for the disease until 1921.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]} In
July, while on the Isle of
Mull for the walking tour, Keats caught a bad cold and "was too thin
and fevered to proceed on the journey".^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]} On
his return south, Keats continued to nurse Tom, exposing himself to the highly
infectious disease. Some biographers suggest that this is when tuberculosis,
his "family disease", first takes hold.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]} Tom
Keats died on 1 December 1818.

Death

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Keats's
House in Rome

During 1820, Keats displayed
increasingly serious symptoms of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], to the
extent that he suffered two lung haemorrhages in the first few days of
February.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]} He
lost large amounts of blood and was bled further by the attending physician.
Hunt nursed him in London
for much of the summer. At the suggestion of his doctors, he agreed to move to Italy with his
friend [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].
On 13 September, they left for [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
and four days later boarded the sailing brig The Maria Crowther. Keats wrote
his final revisions of "Bright Star" aboard the ship. The journey was
a minor catastrophe: storms broke out followed by a dead calm that slowed the
ship’s progress. When it finally docked in Naples,
the ship was held in quarantine for ten days because of a suspected outbreak of
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] in Britain. Keats
reached Rome on
November 14 by which time all hope of a warmer climate had evaporated.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

On arrival in Italy, he moved into a villa on the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] in Rome, today the Keats-Shelley
Memorial House museum. Despite care from Severn
and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], his health rapidly
deteriorated. The medical attention Keats received may have hastened his death.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]} In
November 1820, 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 reduce the blood flow to his
stomach. He also bled the poet; a standard treatment of the day, but likely a
significant contributor to Keats's weakness.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
Keats's friend [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] writes: "They could have used
opium in small doses, and Keats had asked Severn
to buy a bottle of opium when they were setting off on their voyage. 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 let 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 end he went to the doctor who
took it away. As a result Keats went through dreadful agonies with nothing to
ease the pain at all." ^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
Keats was furious with both Severn and Clarke
when they refused [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
(opium). He repeatedly demanded "how long is this posthumous existence of
mine to go on?". Severn writes,
"Keats raves till I am in a complete tremble for him," ^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
continuing, "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 thank 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 quiet, that I still thought he slept."^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}