John Keats

The English poet John Keats (1795-1821) stressed that man's quest for happiness and fulfillment is thwarted by the sorrow and corruption inherent in human nature. His works are marked by rich imagery and melodic beauty.

John Keats was born on Oct. 31, 1795, the first child of a London lower-middle-class family. In 1803 he was sent to school at Enfield, where he gained a favorable reputation for high spirits and boyish pugnaciousness. His father died in an accident in 1804, and his mother in 1810, presumably of tuberculosis. Meanwhile, Keats's interest had shifted from fighting to reading.

When he left school in 1811, Keats was apprenticed to an apothecary-surgeon in Edmonton. Then it was that Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene awakened him to the charm and power of poetry. The imaginative beauty of Spenser's world of fantasy fulfilled some romantic yearning in his adolescent mind, and he was even more impressed by the poet's mastery of language as evidenced in the aptness and the sensory intensity of his imagery. It was probably during his last months at Edmonton that Keats first tried his hand at writing: four stanzas entitled "Imitation of Spenser."

On Oct. 2, 1815, Keats was registered at Guy's Hospital, where he was to pursue his medical studies. He was a conscientious student, but poetry gained increasing hold on his imagination. Some growing sense of alienation may be perceived in his first published poem, the sonnet "O solitude! If I must with thee dwell," which Leigh Hunt printed in the Examiner on May 5, 1816.

Autumn 1816 brought decisive weeks in the maturation of Keats's art and personality. In late September he read George Chapman's translation of Homer, and this impressed upon him a new aspect of both Elizabethan and Greek poetry: no longer the mellow sensuousness, the exquisite fantasy that he had found in Spenser, but a virility in theme and style that was to encourage him in his turn to "speak out loud and bold." In October he made the acquaintance of Hunt and of some of the young men who were to become his devoted friends and to whom he addressed so many admirable letters over the next 4 years. During November and December he wrote most of the poems for his first volume, which was published in March 1817.

Although it contains many felicitous, and at times arresting, phrases, the book testifies to the young poet's inexperience and immaturity. The derivative mannerisms of some of the sonnets, the easy sybaritic nature description in "I stood tiptoe," the romantic diffuseness and facile escapism of "Sleep and Poetry" do much to account for the criticism—though not the venomous malice—it received at the hands of Blackwood's Magazine in October. In retrospect, this first volume has a character of anticipation rather than achievement.

Publication of Endymion

The same cannot be said of Endymion: A Poetic Romance, to the writing of which Keats devoted most of his time from April to December 1817 and which appeared in May 1818. This mythical story of the Latmian shepherd's love for the moon goddess provided him with a narrative framework through which he hoped to discipline his exuberant imagination; within a firm structure that takes the hero through the bowels of the earth, under the sea, and through the sky, he could nevertheless give free rein to his fancy in a great variety of incidents. Keats turned the story of Endymion into an allegory of the romantic longing to overcome the boundaries of ordinary human experience. The similarity with Percy Bysshe Shelley's Alastor, which had been published in 1816, is obvious; but whereas the quest led Shelley's hero to despair and death, Endymion significantly realizes that ultimate identification with transcendence is not to be achieved through the unmediated vision he had sought, but through humble acceptance of human limitations and of the misery built into man's condition.

Keats's letters reveal that at this time several of his friends were ill or suffering from some sort of vexation. His brother was very unwell, and he himself, after a bad cold, prophetically feared in October 1817 that "I shall never be again secure in Robustness." Like other romantic writers, Keats had a central need somehow to adjust the evidence that, as he put it, "The world is full of troubles" with an exalted intuition of cosmic harmony; this preoccupation runs as a major trend through his letters.

Another basic problem with which Keats's letters deal is how to reconcile the rival claims of romantic subjectivity, which makes for sincerity, concreteness, intensity, and originality, and of esthetic objectivity, which alone raises poetry to universal meaningfulness. Such reconciliation, he thought, had been achieved by Shakespeare through a quality which Keats, in December 1817, had called "Negative Capability."

It may have been in a deliberate attempt to secure greater impersonality that in March-April 1818, after the allegory of Endymion, he turned to straightforward narrative in Isabella, which is based on a story by Boccaccio. Although the poem is distinctly inferior, its theme was connected with Keats's more philosophical preoccupations, as it centers on the beauty and greatness of tragic love.

On the whole, 1818 brought a lull in Keats's creative output. His letters, however, show that it was also a period of rapid inner growth. By May he had become articulately conscious of several pregnant verities: that experience, rather than unbridled fancy, is the key to true poetry; that sorrow and suffering are not to be eschewed but should be expected—in 1819 he was to say "greeted"—as a necessary step in the making of the soul; that no great poetry can be achieved if "high Sensations" are not completed by "extensive knowledge" and that he himself, in his exploration of life's "dark passages," had not yet reached further than the "Chamber of Maiden-Thought."

Later Works

It was presumably in order to give poetic utterance to this enriched view of life and art that Keats started work on Hyperion in September 1818. This new poem linked up with Endymion, as an essential part of its purpose was to describe the growth of Apollo into a true poet through ever deeper acceptance and understanding of change and sorrow. But Keats was unable to get ahead with it for a number of reasons: a trip to Scotland had impaired his health; Blackwood's had published a vitriolic attack on Endymion; his brother, Tom, had died after several weeks' painful illness. Keats's friends were trying to entertain him, and he was reluctantly swept up in the absorbing trivialities of social life. Moreover, at this time he fell in love with Fanny Brawne.

In spring 1819 Keats sought creative relief from his failure to give satisfactory shape to his idea in new ventures which were apparently less ambitious, yet proved to be the crowning work of his annus mirabilis. Turning once more to verse narrative, he first produced the opulent Eve of St. Agnes, in deliberate revulsion against what he now saw as the "mawkish" sentimentality of Isabella. The rape of Madeline in this poem was soon to find its dialectical counterpart in the ghostlike idealism of La Belle dame sans merci, a ballad that tells of the mysterious seduction of a medieval knight by another of Keats's elusive, enigmatic, half-divine ladies. Each poem embodies an important trend in Keats's poetry: his sybaritic sense of exquisite sensuality verging at times on eroticism, and a longing mixed with fear and diffidence for some experience beyond human mortality.

These were followed in the spring and summer of 1819 by the first great odes: "Ode to Psyche," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," and "Ode to a Nightingale." These, together with the later "Ode on Indolence" and "Ode on Melancholy," are among the most acute imaginative explorations of the intricate relation between the contrasting experiences and aspirations whose interplay had always controlled Keats's inspiration: sorrow and bliss, art and reality, life and dream, truth and romance, death and immortality.

The triumphant balance and integration achieved in the odes was inevitably precarious. They coincided with the positive conception of the world as a "Vale of Soulmaking," which the poet had framed in April. But incipient financial trouble, together with his tortured love for Fanny, were beginning to press upon Keats. The three schemes that kept him busy during the latter half of 1819 illustrate his confusion and perplexity. In cooperation with one of his friends, he wrote his only drama, Otho the Great, in the futile hope of acquiring both money and public recognition. He also made his last attempt to define the function of the poet in The Fall of Hyperion; but this, like the former Hyperion, was never completed and remains a tantalizing fragment of cryptic, inconclusive beauty. Significantly, the last long poem that he managed to bring to completion was Lamia, a brilliantly ambiguous piece which leads to the disenchanted conclusion that both the artist and the lover live on deceptive illusions.

Keats's health had been declining for some time. In February 1820 a severe hemorrhage in the lungs revealed the seriousness of the disease. His third and last volume, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and Other Poems, was printed in July. In September, Keats left for Italy on an invitation from Shelley. He died in Rome on Feb. 23, 1821.

Further Reading

The best complete introduction to Keats, biographical and critical, is Douglas Bush, John Keats (1966). The standard biography is Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (1963). For bibliography and general information on Keats see James Robertson MacGillivray, Keats: A Bibliography and Reference Guide with an Essay on Keats' Reputation (1949).

Clarence Dewitt Thorpe, The Mind of John Keats (1926; repr. 1964), combines critical insight into the poetry with illumination of Keats's personality. Extensive critical treatment of Keats's poetry is in Maurice Roy Ridley, Keats' Craftsmanship (1933); Claude Lee Finney, The Evolution of Keats's Poetry (1936); Walter Jackson Bate, The Stylistic Development of Keats (1945); Richard Harter Fogle, The Imagery of Keats and Shelley (1949); John Middleton Murry, Keats (1955); E. C. Pettet, On the Poetry of Keats (1957); Kenneth Muir, ed., John Keats: A Reassessment (1958); W. J. Bate, ed., Keats (1964); and Douglas Hill, John Keats (1969). For detailed analyses of individual poems see Earl R. Wasserman, The Finer Tone (1955); Harvey T. Lyon, Keats' Well-read Urn (1958); Jack Stillinger, ed., Keats's Odes (1968); and Albert S. Gérard, English Romantic Poetry (1968).

For general background the reader may consult Ian Jack, English Literature, 1815-1832 (1963), which has very convenient bibliographies. □

John Keats

Born: October 31, 1795
London, England
Died: February 23, 1821
Rome, Italy
English poet

The English Romantic poet John Keats stressed that man's quest for happiness and fulfillment is thwarted (prevented from taking place) by the sorrow and corruption inherent (existing as an essential characteristic) in human nature. His works are marked with rich imagery and melodic beauty.

Early life

John Keats was born in London, England, on October 31, 1795, the first of Thomas and Frances Keats's five children. Thomas was working as a stable manager for John Jennings when he met Jennings's daughter, Francis. Thomas, known for his charm, energy, and respectability, crossed the social barrier and won Francis's heart and the two were married. Both of John's parents were affectionate and loving toward their children. John especially shared a close relationship with his mother. His father died in an accident in 1804. His mother, after a second marriage and divorce, died from a lung disease in 1810.

In 1811 Keats became an apprentice (worked for someone to learn a trade with little or no pay) to an apothecary (druggist) in Edmonton, England. There Keats first tried his hand at writing and produced four stanzas (short poems) entitled "Imitation of Spenser." These were inspired by the poem "Fairie Queene" by Edmund Spenser (c. 1552–1599).

On October 2, 1815, Keats started medical studies at Guy's Hospital. He was a conscientious (careful) student, but poetry gained an increasing hold on his imagination. It is thought that Keats was influenced at this time by the boldness evident in a translation by George Chapman (c. 1559–1634) of the Odyssey by the Greek poet Homer (c. 850 b.c.e.). His first volume of poems was published in March 1817.

Publication of Endymion

Keats's next work, Endymion: A Poetic Romance, was published in May 1818. Keats turned the story of Endymion, a mythical shepherd, into an allegory (a narrative in which abstract ideas are represented by people) of the romantic longing to overcome the boundaries of ordinary human experience. Endymion realizes that ultimate identification with transcendence (rising above the universe) is to be achieved through humble acceptance of human limitations and of the misery built into man's condition. Keats's letters reveal that at this time several of his friends were ill. His brother was very unwell, and he himself, after a bad cold, prophetically (foretellingly) feared in October 1817 that "I shall never be again secure in Robustness (health and strength)."

In early 1818 Keats turned to straightforward narrative in Isabella, which is based on a story by Boccaccio (1313–1375). Its theme was connected with Keats's more philosophical (pertaining to inquiry concerning the source and nature of human knowledge) preoccupations—the beauty and greatness of tragic love.

Later works

Keats started work on Hyperion in September 1818. An essential part of its purpose was to describe the growth of the Greek god Apollo into a true poet through ever deeper acceptance and understanding of change and sorrow. But Keats was unable to get ahead with it for a number of reasons, including impaired health, negative reception of Endymion by an influential critic, and the death of his brother, Tom.

In spring 1819 Keats turned once more to verse narrative. He first produced the opulent "Eve of St. Agnes" in deliberate revulsion (extreme displeasure) against what he now saw as the "mawkish" (sickly sentimental) sentimentality of Isabella. This was followed by "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," a simple narrative poem that tells of the mysterious seduction of a medieval knight by another of Keats's elusive, enigmatic (mysterious), half-divine ladies. Each poem embodies an important trend in Keats's poetry, a longing mixed with fear and diffidence (lack of self-confidence) for some experience beyond human mortality.

These were followed in the spring and summer of 1819 by the first of his great odes: "Ode to Psyche," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," and "Ode to a Nightingale." These, together with the later "Ode on Indolence" and "Ode on Melancholy," are acutely imaginative explorations of the intricate (complex) relation between sorrow and bliss, life and dream.

During the latter half of 1819 Keats wrote his only drama, Otho the Great. He also made his last attempt to define the function of the poet in The Fall of Hyperion. However, like the earlier Hyperion, it was never completed and remains a tantalizing (fascinating) fragment of cryptic (mysterious) beauty.

His last years

Significantly, the last long poem that Keats wrote was Lamia. This is a brilliantly ambiguous (likely to be interpreted in more than one way) piece which leads to the conclusion that both the artist and the lover live on deceptive illusions (a world of the imagination not based on reality and likely to mislead). His third and last volume, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and Other Poems, was printed in July 1820.

In September 1820, although his health had been declining for some time, Keats left for Italy on an invitation from the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822). He died in Rome on February 23, 1821, at the age of twenty-five.

All of Keats's poetry is filled with a mysterious yet uplifting sense of beauty and joy. His works explore many possibilities but do not insist on any one answer to the enduring problems of life. The experience of life, not its perfect understanding, was Keats's major concern.

For More Information

Hebron, Stephen. John Keats. London: British Library, 2002.

Keats, John. Keats: Truth & Imagination. Edited by K. E. Sullivan. New York: Gramercy Books, 1999.

Motion, Andrew. Keats. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.

Walsh, John Evangelist. Darkling I Listen: The Last Days and Death of John Keats. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999.

Ward, Aileen. John Keats: The Making of a Poet. Rev. ed. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1986.

John Keats 1795-1821, English poet, b. London. He is considered one of the greatest of English poets.

The son of a livery stable keeper, Keats attended school at Enfield, where he became the friend of Charles Cowden Clarke, the headmaster's son, who encouraged his early learning. Apprenticed to a surgeon (1811), Keats came to know Leigh Hunt and his literary circle, and in 1816 he gave up surgery to write poetry. His first volume of poems appeared in 1817. It included "I stood tip-toe upon a little hill," "Sleep and Poetry," and the famous sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer."

Endymion, a long poem, was published in 1818. Although faulty in structure, it is nevertheless full of rich imagery and color. Keats returned from a walking tour in the Highlands to find himself attacked in Blackwood's Magazine —an article berated him for belonging to Leigh Hunt's "Cockney school" of poetry—and in the Quarterly Review. The critical assaults of 1818 mark a turning point in Keats's life; he was forced to examine his work more carefully, and as a result the influence of Hunt was diminished. However, these attacks did not contribute to Keats's decline in health and his early death, as Shelley maintained in his elegy "Adonais."

Keats's passionate love for Fanny Brawne seems to have begun in 1818. Fanny's letters to Keats's sister show that her critics' contention that she was a cruel flirt was not true. Only Keats's failing health prevented their marriage. He had contracted tuberculosis, probably from nursing his brother Tom, who died in 1818. With his friend, the artist Joseph Severn , Keats sailed for Italy shortly after the publication of Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820), which contains most of his important work and is probably the greatest single volume of poetry published in England in the 19th cent. He died in Rome in Feb., 1821, at the age of 25.

In spite of his tragically brief career, Keats is one of the most important English poets. He is also among the most personally appealing. Noble, generous, and sympathetic, he was capable not only of passionate love but also of warm, steadfast friendship. Keats is ranked, with Shelley and Byron , as one of the three great Romantic poets. Such poems as "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "To Autumn," and "Ode on Melancholy" are unequaled for dignity, melody, and richness of sensuous imagery. All of his poetry is filled with a mysterious and elevating sense of beauty and joy.

Keats's posthumously published pieces include "La Belle Dame sans Merci," in its way as great an evocation of romantic medievalism as his "The Eve of St. Agnes." Among his sonnets, familiar ones are "When I have fears that I may cease to be" and "Bright star! would I were as steadfast as thou art." "Lines on the Mermaid Tavern," "Fancy," and "Bards of Passion and of Mirth" are delightful short poems.

Some of Keats's finest work is in the unfinished epic "Hyperion." In recent years critical attention has focused on Keats's philosophy, which involves not abstract thought but rather absolute receptivity to experience. This attitude is indicated in his celebrated term "negative capability" — "to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thought."

Bibliography: Keats's letters (ed. by H. E. Rollins, 1958) vividly reveal his character, opinions, and feelings. See his poetical works, ed. by H. W. Garrod (2d ed. 1958); his autobiography, ed. by E. V. Weller (1933); biographies by A. Ward (1963), W. J. Bate (1963, repr. 1979), R. Gittings (1968), and A. Motion (1998); account of his last days by J. E. Walsh (2000); studies by W. J. Bate (1945), M. Dickstein (1971), D. van Ghent (1983), and S. Plumly (2008).

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.

Keats, John (1795–1821). Poet and sometime surgeon's apprentice, his early work suffered by association with Leigh Hunt and the ‘Cockney School’, though he was never, as Byron gibed, ‘snuffed out by an article’. Most richly sensuous of Romantic poets, with a Schubertian sensitivity to love and death, the ‘indescribable gusto’ which Arnold found in his writing continues to attract. ‘O for a life of sensations rather than thoughts!’ he exclaimed, but a keen intelligence is inseparable from the rapid development of his brief career. A severe self-critic, he introduced Endymion (1818) with apologies and abandoned the over-Miltonic Hyperion the following year. Nursing his dying brother he was torn between the ‘realms of gold’ he encountered in literature and the world ‘where men sit and hear each other groan’. His best work, the Odes of 1819, dramatizes this conflict. By now ill himself with tuberculosis, a visit to Italy came too late to save him.

John Saunders

Keats, John (1795–1821) English poet, one of the major figures of Romanticism. His first volume, Poems (1817), included “On First Looking into Chapman's Homer”. Keats was savagely criticized for the four-volume romance Endymion (1818). Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes and Other Poems (1820) included the ballad “La Belle Dame sans Merci” and the magnificent lyrics “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, “Ode to a Nightingale”, and “Ode to Autumn”. Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome, leaving unfinished the epic Hyperion. Percy Shelley mourned his passing in his elegy Adonais (1821)

Keats, John (1795–1821). Poet and sometime surgeon's apprentice, his early work suffered by association with Leigh Hunt and the ‘Cockney School’. Most richly sensuous of Romantic poets, with a Schubertian sensitivity to love and death, the ‘indescribable gusto’ which Arnold found in his writing continues to attract. A severe self‐critic, he introduced Endymion (1818) with apologies and abandoned the over‐Miltonic Hyperion the following year. His best work is contained in the Odes of 1819.