John Keats (1795-1821) was an English Romantic poet. He was one of the main figures of the second generation of Romantic poets, along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, despite his works having been in publication for only four years before his death from tuberculosis at the age of 25.
Born in London his father, a livery-stable manager, died when Keats was 9 and his mother died when he was 15. He worked as a junior house surgeon, at Guy’s and St. Thomas’ hospitals until 1817 when he devoted himself entirely to poetry. Keats had first read Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene when he was eighteen and it awakened his love of poetry and shocked him into self-awareness of his own powers of imagination.
John Keats
“Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou cansst not leave...”
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The reviews of his early publications were mixed and after his death it was common to believe that these attacks had shaken Keats’s resolve and broken his health. Most of Keats’ circle recognised the shortcomings of these early works: Shelley, for reasons of his own, exaggerated the effect of the conservative reviewers’ savage, and Byron was at first scornful of Keats’s weakness, as Shelley portrayed it to him, but refused to criticise him publicly after his death. Living in lodgings in Hampstead with his brothers, Tom and George, Keats met these reviews with a calm assertion of his own talents, and he went on steadily writing poetry.
In the summer of 1818 Keats went on a walking tour in the Lake District (of northern England) and Scotland with his friend Charles Brown, and his exposure and over exertions on that trip brought on the first symptoms of the tuberculosis of which he was to die. On his return to London he met Fanny Brawne, a near neighbour in Hampstead, with whom he soon fell hopelessly and tragically in love. The relation with Fanny had a decisive effect on Keats’s development, but his uncertain material situation and his failing health made it impossible for their relationship to run a normal course. After Tom’s death from tuberculosis in the autumn of 1818 (George had already gone to America), Keats moved into Wentworth Place in Hampstead with Brown, and in April 1819 Brawne and her mother became his next-door neighbours and 6 months later they got engaged.
John Keats
“The winged Psyche with awaken’d eyes”
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It was during 1819 that he wrote the famous odes Ode to Psyche, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode on Melancholy, To Autumn and Ode on Indolence. In style and power the odes represent Keats’s finest poetry; indeed, they are among the greatest achievements of Romantic art.
During 1820 Keats displayed increasingly serious symptoms of tuberculosis, suffering two lung haemorrhages in the first few days of February and in the winter he moved to Italy into a villa on the Spanish Steps in Rome, today the Keats–Shelley Memorial House museum. The first months of 1821 marked a slow and steady decline into the final stage of tuberculosis and in February he died and was buried under a tombstone bearing no name or date, only the words, "Here lies One whose Name was writ in Water." When Keats died at 25, he had been writing poetry seriously for only about six years but was thought of as a poet whose talent, though its development was cut short, was the equal of Shelley’s and Byron‘s.
John Keats
“Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”
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