Keats, John

Keats, John (1795–1821), the son of the manager of a livery stables in Moorfields. He was apprenticed to an apothecary-surgeon, but cancelled his fifth year of apprenticeship and became a student at Guy's Hospital; in 1816 he was licensed to practise as an apothecary, but he abandoned the profession for poetry. To this period belong ‘Ode to Apollo’ and ‘Hymn to Apollo’. He met Leigh Hunt, who in 1816 published in the Examiner Keats's poem, ‘O Solitude’. Keats met Shelley and Haydon, and in 1817 his first volume of poems was published; it included among sonnets, epistles, and miscellaneous poems, ‘I stood tip-toe upon a little hill’ and ‘Sleep and Poetry’. In the autumn came the first of Lockhart's harsh attacks in Blackwood's, labelling Keats and his associates as members of the so-called Cockney school. During the winter of 1817–18 Keats saw something of Wordsworth and Hazlitt, both of whom much influenced his thought and practice. Endymion, dedicated to Chatterton, published in the spring of 1818, was savagely attacked by Lockhart in Blackwood's; and Keats finished ‘Isabella, or the Pot of Basil’ in May. With his friend Charles Armitage Brown (1786–1842) Keats then visited the Lakes, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. In December 1817, Keats moved into Brown's house in Hampstead, now known as Keats House. There he met Fanny Brawne, with whom he fell deeply in love. September 1818 marked the beginning of what is sometimes referred to as the Great Year; he began Hyperion in its first version, abandoning it a year later; he wrote, consecutively, ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, ‘The Eve of St Mark’, the ‘Ode to Psyche’, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, and probably at about the same time the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, ‘Ode on Melancholy’, and ‘Ode on Indolence’; ‘Lamia Part I’, ‘Otho the Great’ (in collaboration with Brown); the second version of Hyperion, called The Fall of Hyperion, ‘To Autumn’, and ‘Lamia Part II’. During this year he was beset with financial problems. In the winter of 1819, he had become increasingly ill with tuberculosis and his great creative work was now over. His second volume of poems, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and other Poems, was published in July 1820, and included, as well as the title poems, five odes, Hyperion, ‘Fancy’, and other works. Shelley invited Keats to Italy and in September Keats set off with his friend Severn. They did not go to the Shelleys but settled in Rome, where Keats died the following February.

Keats has always been regarded as one of the principal figures in the Romantic movement, and his stature as a poet has grown steadily through all changes of fashion. Tennyson considered him the greatest poet of the 19th cent., and M. Arnold commended his ‘intellectual and spiritual passion’ for beauty.

His letters, published in 1848 and 1878, have come to be regarded with almost the admiration given to his poetry; T. S. Eliot described them as certainly the most notable and most important ever written by any English poet.