John KeatsEssay Preview: John KeatsReport this essayKeats, John (1795-1821), English poet and letter writer whose work carried the Romantic movement in England to rich maturity. Despite his tragically early death at the age of 25, Keats composed poetry of great power and beauty in a surprisingly wide variety of kinds: a fragmentary epic, Hyperion; several romances, including Endymion and The Eve of St. Agnes; and a miscellany of shorter lyrics, of which the best known are the sonnets and a series of major odes, including “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and “To Autumn.” Keatss famous letters record the growth of his art and thought in vivid and moving detail.
Somewhere in this very book, Keats's life had reached the pinnacle of poetic potential. His first published work was, in 1805, The Existence of the Father in Heaven, a poetic and lyrical work and story which his son John, an eminent painter in that century, would continue to work on during the next several decades. The manuscript was written by an English gentleman named William Keats, a noted scholar and critic of poetry and the English language; Keates lived from 1804 to 1813; his sons, William Keats and Alexander, joined the English colony at an early age, and his son Alexander returned to London in 1820 as an interpreter.Keats was the poet laureate and was a natural choice-maker, but he began to focus on his work as a painter, particularly his work on the workshelf. When Charles Taylor, an ardent supporter of Keats, in 1827 published the second edition of the poem, called it a "beautiful" work, he immediately rejected the writer's own account, since his friend would have taken "his word of the worst poetry and of every poet in America, in a manner which I am not at liberty to write": Keats had not only been making poets famous but had won all that Taylor was demanding, so much so that "the great master of American poetry went on, and began to use the same verse in each of his works, for his own sake"; he was no sentimentalist who was as much opposed to the world of poetic prose as Taylor's.
While he is frequently called a poetite, but no one in his day would have thought Keats "such an intellectual and a great poet as Taylor is," Keats was a masterly and accomplished writer whose works are frequently quoted in American and European literature. He has been credited with nearly fifty poetry columns and two other poetry collections. In 1852 he was the first to propose that the word "theory," as used by the English, could be used interchangeably with "punctuation," which as he observed, would mean that writers could choose either of three endings: "anum, amum, or anum." On his work, he chose the final. His original is known as an Oerberich, and the earliest known edition at the University of Illinois was written in 1882, and its influence on American literature is estimated as as high as ten to twenty hundred thousand copies.
Somewhere in this very hard volume, Keats's life has reached the pinnacle ofKeatss literary influence has been extensive; among later writers who admired and imitated his work were Tennyson, Browning, and Yeats. Although Keats has been categorized as a “poets poet,” whose dedication to art overrode all other considerations, moral, political, and religious, a truer portrait would stress his moral centrality and his balanced good sense as a man and artist, as well as his superb practical command of his craft. Keats today ranks among the very few poets who can bear comparison, by virtue of their imaginative amplitude and power, to Shakespeare.
Life. Keats was born in London on Oct. 31, 1795. His mother, Frances Keats, was the only daughter of John Jennings, the owner of the Swan and Hoop, a livery stable near the northern boundary of the city. His father, Thomas Keats, was head ostler at the stable, later becoming manager and, in 1803, owner. Keats was the first of five children. He had three brothers (George, Tom, and a brother who died in infancy, Edward) and a sister, Frances (or Fanny).
Early Life and Education. In 1803, at the age of eight, Keats was sent to the Clarke Academy in Enfield, a country village to the north of London. The school was known for its progressive views of pedagogy and discipline, as well as for a kindly headmaster, and Keatss years there appear to have been generally happy. His classmates remembered him not for literary precocity but for his “terrier courage”; he was a high-spirited and scrappy boy who, though short in stature, delighted in a just fray, as when he defended a younger brother against a bully. In his last years at the school, Keats became an omnivorous reader, won several prizes for academic excellence, and began a translation of Virgils Aeneid. At Enfield, he met his first literary mentor and loyal friend, Charles Cowden Clarke, son of the headmaster. (See also Clarke, Charles Cowden.)
Keatss father died suddenly in April 1804 after a fall from a horse. The children then went to live with their grandparents and, on their grandfathers death in 1805, moved with their grandmother to Edmonton, a village near Enfield. After a short-lived second marriage, Keatss mother joined the family in Edmonton. She died of tuberculosis in 1810, nursed in her last days by John. The childrens grandmother died in 1814, leaving a substantial trust fund of over ÐЈ800, the greater part of which was tied up in litigation and never reached the children. As their guardian and trustee she chose a respectable tea merchant, Richard Abbey, who proved an unfortunate choice. Abbey quietly concealed from the children the full amount of the inheritance, adding greatly to their later financial worries.
On his departure from school in 1811, Keats decided on a career in medicine, and for the next four years, he was an apprentice to a surgeon-apothecary in Edmonton. In 1815 he entered Guys Hospital in London for a year of training, and he received his apothecarys certificate in 1816.
Literary Career. Meanwhile, Keatss literary interests flowered into a serious dedication to poetry. During his apprentice years Keats tried his hand at writing some lyric poems and kept up his literary friendship with Clarke. In summer 1816 he finally decided to give up medicine, make do as best he could on his meager and uncertain inheritance, and devote himself to a career in poetry. His first published poem, a sonnet, “To Solitude,” appeared on May 5, 1816, in the Examiner, a liberal journal edited by the poet-journalist Leigh Hunt; his first great poem, the sonnet On First Looking into Chapmans Homer, dates from October. Keats now made important literary contacts: Benjamin Robert Haydon, painter and diarist; Leigh Hunt; and, through Hunt, such poets and critics as Shelley, Wordsworth, Charles Lamb, and William Hazlitt. Closer to Keats were a number of lesser-known men, including Richard Woodhouse, Benjamin Bailey, and John Hamilton Reynolds, the recipient of several of Keatss most thoughtful letters.
In spring 1817 Keats and his brothers took rooms at 1 Well Walk in the London suburb of Hampstead. Early in March Haydon took him to see the sculptures brought by Lord Elgin from the Acropolis in Athens—an aesthetic revelation that he recorded in a sonnet. (See also Elgin Marbles.) His first volume, Poems, also appeared in March and was reviewed favorably in several journals. In April Keats began his first long poem, the romance Endymion, at which he labored throughout the summer and fall. It was finished in late November and published in May 1818.
The year 1818 saw many changes, most of them distressing. During much of the spring and fall, Keats nursed his brother Tom, who died of tuberculosis on December 1 after a long and painful decline. In April he composed a second narrative poem, Isabella; or The Pot of Basil. In June he lost the company of his brother George, who sailed for America with his new wife and eventually made a success of a lumber business in Louisville, Ky. Keats spent the next two months with a friend, Charles Brown, on a walking tour through northern England, Scotland, and Ireland. Not long after returning to London, he met and fell in love with Fanny Brawne, the 18-year-old daughter of a Hampstead widow. Despite the torment that this love would cause Keats in the following years, when illness and professional setbacks made marriage impossible, Fanny should be remembered as she was, a loyal and loving friend.
In September two savage attacks on Endymion appeared in the influential and politically conservative Quarterly Review and Blackwoods Magazine. Although their true target was the liberal Hunt, whose literary influence Keats had decisively rejected nearly a year earlier, the reviews ridiculed him as Hunts disciple and an upstart “Cockney poet.” (See also Hunt, Leigh; Blackwoods Magazine.) Indignant friends later blamed the reviewers, J. G. Lockhart and John Wilson Croker, for the poets death, a perhaps pardonable sentimentality that, unfortunately, is alluded to on his