John Keats Biography

Dromo's Den

KEATS, John (1795-1821). An English poet, born in London, Oct. 29 or 31, 1795. When about eight years old, he was sent to the school kept by John Clarke at Enfield. Here he formed a friendship with the master's son, Charles Cowden Clarke, learned Latin, possibly French, and read eagerly, especially in Greek mythology. 'The Greek Language however, he never learned; most of his early notions of Greece he got from the Classical Dictionary of Lemprière. His father, a livery-stable keeper, died in 1804; and his mother, who had married William Rawlings, another stable keeper, soon left him and went to live with her well-to-do mother in Edmonton, where she died in 1810. At school Keats was not a very studious youth; but he was admired for his nobility of character and his courage; he was quick-tempered, but quick to forgive, pugnacious, and fond of sports. His personal beauty was striking. On his mother's death Keats was taken from school by his guardians and apprenticed for five years to a surgeon at Edmonton. Of this period we know little save that one day a comrade read him Spenser's Epithalamium and lent him the Faerie Queene. This was a revelation. Keats had found his way. He was entranced by Spenser's world of romance and forthwith set himself to writing verse in imitation of his master. At this time he also fell under the influence of Gray and Moore. In 1814 he quarreled with the surgeon to whom he had been apprenticed and went to London, where he continued his studies. for which, however, he had no real liking, at Guy's and St. Thomas's hospitals.

Keats soon made the acquaintance of Leigh Hunt, Shelley, and others, and in 1817 of the painter Hayden, all of whom exerted a powerful influence upon him. With Hunt he lived for a time. His first published poem. the. sonnet beginning "O Solitude, if I with thee must dwell," appeared in Leigh Hunt's Examiner (May 5, 1816). It was followed on December 1 by the great sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," which Hunt accompanied with observations on its author and the new school of poetry. Four other sonnets speedily followed. In March, 1817, appeared Poems by John Keats, dedicated to Hunt. The volume fell flat, for every one was at that time under the sway of Moore, Scott, and Byron. Keats at once began Endymion, which was published in 1818. This year he made a tour through the English Lake district and Scotland, where he contracted the throat trouble which ultimately developed into consumption. Just after his return to England appeared the famous attacks on Endymion (Blackwood's Magazine, August, 1818; and the Quarterly Review, dated April, 1818, but published in September). Whether or not Keats's critical foe was Lockhart, he had fervent defenders in Shelley, who in his Adonais calls his friend's assailants assassins, and in Byron, who devoted to Keats a strophe in Don Juan. Keats continued to write, though failing health and his passion for Fanny Brawne, a girl with whom he had fallen in love several years earlier, were not conducive to sustained work. In 1820 appeared his third volume, Lamia and Other Poems. He died in Rome Feb. 23, 1821, and was buried there near Shelley, by the pyramid of Caius Cestius. Keats did not live to produce much, as compared with the work of the famous poets who were his contemporaries. The affectations which marred his first two volumes naturally led to severe criticism. The third volume contained poetry of the most exquisite quality. There may be greater lyric poetry than that of his odes, but none is lovelier. "On a Grecian Urn," "To a Nightingale," and "To Autumn" are above all critical deduction or detraction. In "Isabel," "The Eve of St. Agnes," and "La belle dame sans Merci" he captured the very spirit of mediaeval romance. His longer poems, of an excellence uneven and far from sustained, are still noble creations of the poetic imagination and rich in passages of the rarest beauty. Thanks to the perfection of a group of his shorter poems, to the deathless phrases sown through his work, and to the magic of his exquisite natural imagery, he became the poet's poet. His influence upon the three generations of poets that have followed him has been greater than that of Shelley. The marks of it are plain in the poetry of Tennyson, Rossetti, Swinburne, and Morris, and at moments even in that of Browning. Since his death his fame has increased more and more, and a high place by the side of Shelley is assured him.

The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XIII (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 139-140.