Early Life
On October 31, 1795 in London’s northern gate of Moorgate, John Keats was born. He was the oldest of four children and lost both of his parents by the age of fourteen. His father, Thomas Keats, was a respected innkeeper who died when Keats was eight after a riding accident, and his mother died of Tuberculosis six years later. At that point, Keats’s grandmother appointed guardianship to Richard Abbey and John Rowland Sandell, two London merchants.
Keats entered the Clark School, Enfield Academy at the age of eight. There, he became friends with Charles Cowden Clarke, the son of the headmaster, John Clarke. While studying at the academy, Keats became one of Clarke’s favorite pupils, and he exposed Keats to extensive literature. Keats won essay contests two or three terms in a row. Clarke introduced Keats to radical reformers, John Cartwright and Joseph Priestley, and Leigh Hunt, who would later be the first to publish Keats’s work in The Examiner. Clarke said that these mentors and figures, “no doubt laid the foundation of [Keats’s] love of civil and religious liberty.” In 1810, when Keats was 16, his guardians pulled him out of the academy to apprentice with an apothecary-surgeon and to study medicine at Guy’s (London) Hospital. In 1816, Keats became a licensed apothecary, but never practiced his profession, turning to poetry instead.
Literary Inspiration
While Keats was studying medicine, he read voraciously and translated works written in Latin and French. He would visit Clarke at Enfield for more books. During this time, Keats finished translating Virgil’s Aeneid, and “devoured rather than read” the borrowed books. This included Ovid’s Metamorphosis, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Virgil’s Ecologies, and dozens of others. However, the book that awakened Keats’s love for poetry and shocked him into a self-awareness of the power of imagination was Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Around 1816, Keats became excited about the work of William Wordsworth, another romantic poet. These works would influence Keats’s poetry and form later.
In 1814, Keats wrote his first poem entitled “In Imitation of Spenser”. It has been noted for its appropriation of the Spenserian rhyme scheme and rich imagery, evoking a romantic dream world. From that time on, he began playing with rhyme and meter. When Leigh Hunt was released from prison in 1815, Keats had written the sonnet, “Written on the Day That Mr. Leigh Hunt Left Prison”. This opened a door for his poetic career.
Poetic and Writing Career
Upon reconnecting with Leigh Hunt, Keats began publishing his poetry. His first poem was published in May 1816 in Leigh’s journal, The Examiner. This was followed by the publication of “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”, one of his most famous poems. It was during this time, Hunt introduced Keats to other literary figures, including Williams Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and other prominent Romantic poets. Their influence allowed Keats to publish his first collection, Poems by John Keats, in 1817. Shelley advised Keats to develop a more substantial body of work, but Keats published Endymoin, a four-thousand-line erotic romance the following year.
At the time, Keats’s publications attracted little positive attention and critique. The Quarterly Review and Blackwood’s Magazine, two of the most influential magazines at the time, denounced Keats’s work, declaring it nonsense and associated Keats with the “Cockney school of poets”. The school was associated with Hunt, liberalism, and the second generation of romantic writers. The time between 1818 and 1819 were Keats’s more futile years. He wrote “Bright Star” after falling in love with Fanny Brawne, produced his famous 1819 ode collection, and wrote his narratives including, “Isabella”, “The Eve of St. Agnes”, the unfinished “Hyperion”, “Lamia”, and “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”. Keats’s third and best volume of poetry, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, includes those listed above and was published in 1820. The books received enthusiastic praise from Hunt, Shelley, Charles Lamb and a few others. The editor of the Edinburgh Review, Frances Jeffery, wrote a praised review of the new book and Endymion. Even still, wide critical praise was mostly unenthusiastic.
Aligning himself with Hunt may have been a culprit in the literary criticism Keats received. Hunt himself argued against the masculine (strong syllable) rhymed, end-stopped couplets of Alexander Pope, and Augustan poets before the Romantic Movement. Hunt disliked the median caesurae and “weak syllables”. This argument, with political resonance, promised to break the “aristocratic” sound of the heroic couplet the conservative writers favored. The association with Hunt and the Huntain “Cockney school” certainly did not benefit Keats’s reputation and fame prior to his death. Keats’s poetic innovations in diction, versification, and style (in the sonnets and odes especially) were means for conservative reviewers to attack and ridicule Keats.
As is common within Romanticism, Keats boldly aligned himself with Wordsworth’s naturalism, attacking neoclassicism. Keats began his poetic education in nature to comprehend the human heart, and a lot of his work aims to seek the ideal union of natural grace, liberality, and poetic tradition. Another great interest of Keats was the concept of imagination, it being heavily prevalent and discussed in his poetry. Keats’s best-known doctrine was “Negative Capability”. The theory implies an engagement in the actual through the imaginative identification that simultaneously is a kind of transcendence.
Death and Legacy
On February 23, 1821, Keats died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-five. He was the youngest of the romantic poets. At the time of his death, only around 200 copies of his poetry books had been purchased. Keats’s death was widely attributed to illness resulting from the critical attacks on his work in 1818. Just before his death, he wrote to his lover concerning his legacy: “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.” Shelley supported the accusations of criticism causing Keats’s illness and memorializes him in his Adonia. Lord Byron, another Romantic poet, refuted this. Byron wrote in his eleventh canto of Don Juan that ‘Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle / Should let itself be snuffed out by an article.” Keats’s fame was finally secured by Richard Monckton Milnes’s Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats published in 1848. This was the first biography written about Keats. His early death and manner nourished a tendency for Keats to be idealized. The absence of reliable contemporary likenesses supported this tendency. These circumstances of his death and brevity of his poetic career appealed to twentieth-century biographers.
Keats’s reputation and fame continued to rise during the Victorian period. In 1880, Matthew Arnoldian placed Keats’s achievement on the same plane as Shakespeare. The Poetry Foundation stated that Keats had an “exactly controlled poetic style that ranks Keats, with the William Shakespeare of the sonnets, as one of the greatest lyric poets in English.” Today, Keats is epitomized as a popular Romantic poet. Many argue that he yearned to escape from the pain and banality of reality into a sensuous dream in our imagination. However, this underestimated Keats’s intellectual toughness, good nature, and literary professionalism. Alongside his poetic works, Keats is well known for his letter correspondence, especially those exchanges with his brother, George. These letters are pertinent in understanding Keats on a deeper level and give a better context to his poetic work. The influence of these letters and the significance of poetic achievement confirm his stature as one of the greatest English poets.
Resources
Everest , Kelvin. “Keats, John (1795–1821), Poet.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Sept. 2004, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/15229.
“John Keats.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., www.britannica.com/biography/John-Keats.
“John Keats.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, 2021, www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/john-keats.
Poets.org, Academy of American Poets, 2021, poets.org/poet/john-keats,.