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 English
lyric poet, the archetype of the Romantic writer. While still in
good health, Keats was the opposite of overburdened, sensitive soul.
Keats felt that the deepest meaning of life lay in the apprehension
of material beauty, although his mature poems reveal his fascination
with a world of death and decay. Most of his best work appeared
in one year.
Darkling I listen; and for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death
(from 'To a Nightingale')
Keats was born in London as the son of a livery-stable manager.
He was the oldest of four children, who remained deeply devoted
to each other. After their father died in 1804, Keats's mother remarried
but the marriage was soon broken. She moved with the children, John
and his sister Fanny and brothers George and Tom, to live with her
mother at Edmonton, near London. She died of tuberculosis in 1810.
At school Keats read widely. He was educated at Clarke's School
in Enfield, where he began a translation of the Aeneid. 1811
he was apprenticed to a surgeon-apothecary. His first poem, 'Lines
in Imitation of Spenser', was written in 1814. In that year he moved
to London and resumed his surgical studies in 1815 as a student
at Guy's hospital. Next year he became a Licentiate of the Society
of Apothecaries. Before devoting himself entirely to poetry, Keats
worked as a dresser and junior house surgeon. In London he had met
the editor of The Examiner, Leigh Hunt, who introduced him
to other young Romantics, including Shelley. His poem, 'O Solitude',
also appeared in The Examiner.
Keats's first book, Poems, was published in 1817. Sales
were poor. He spent the spring with his brother Tom and friends
at Shankin. It was about this time Keats started to use his letters
as the vehicle of his thoughts of poetry. They mixed the everyday
events of his own life with comments with his correspondence. Among
others T.S. Eliot considered the letters in The Use of Poetry
and the Use of Criticism (1933) "certainly the most notable
and most important ever written by any English poet'. Endymion,
Keats's first long poem appeared, when he was 21. It told in 4000
lines the love of the moon goddess Cynthia for the young shepherd
Endymion. Keats's greatest works were written in the late 1810s,
among them Lamia, The Eve of St. Agnes, the great
odes and two versions of Hyperion. He worked briefly as a
theatrical critic for The Champion, spent summer of 1818
touring the Lakes, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and after returning
to London he spent the next three months attending his brother Tom,
who was seriously ill with tuberculosis.
 After
Tom's death in December, Keats moved to Hampstead. In the winter
of 1818-19 he worked mainly on Hyperion and The Eve of
St Agnes. The fragmentary Eve of St Mark were composed
during a visit to his friend Charles Wentworth Dilke's parents and
relatives in Sussex. In 1819 Keats finished Lamia, and wrote
another version of Hyperion, called The Fall of Hyperion.
A Wedgwood copy of a Roman copy of a Greek vase inspired his famous
poem 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'. Josiah Wedgwood's copy was purchased
by Sir William Hamilton, who sold it to the duchess of Portland,
who donated the vase to the British Museum in 1784.
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' - that is all
Ye know on earth and all ye need to know.
(from 'Ode on a Grecian Urn')
In 1820 appeared the second volume of Keats poems. It gained a
huge critical success. However, Keats was suffering from tuberculosis
and his poems were marked with sadness partly because he was too
poor to marry Fanny Brawne, the woman he loved. In a letter from
1819 he wrote. "I love you more in that I believe you have liked
me for my own sake and nothing else. I have met with women whom
I relay think would like to be married to a Poem and given away
by a Novel." When his condition gradually worsened, he sailed
for Italy with his friend, the painter Joseph Severn, to escape
England's cold winter. Declining Shelley's invitation to join him
at Pisa, Keats went to Rome, where he died at the age of 25, on
February 23, 1821. Keats did not invent his own epitaph, but remembered
words from the play Philaster, or Love Lies-Ableeding, written by
Beaumont and Fletcher in 1611. "All your better deeds / Shall be
in water writ," one of the characters says. Keats told his friend
Joseph Severn that he wanted on his grave just the line, "Here lies
one whose name was writ in water."
Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art -
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
(from 'The Last Sonnet')
 In
spite of early harsh criticism, Keats's reputation grew after his
death. The poet's letters were published in 1848 and 1878. Keats's
works have influenced among others The Pre-Raphaelites, Oscar Wilde
and Alfred Tennyson. Some later poets have attacked Keats and the
Romantics: for T.S. Eliot Byron was "a disorderly mind, and an uninteresting
one" and Keats and Shelley were "not nearly such great poets as
they are supposed to be".
For further reading: Keats by Andrew Motion (1998). Motion
claims that the author was obsessed with sex and had venereal
disease and these aspects of the poets life were hidden by early
biographers, who underlined Keats's poverty, poor health and misunderstanding
criticism. Other studies: John Keats by R. Gittings (1968);
John Keats by Walter Jackson Bate (1979); Keats: Narrative Poems,
ed. by J.S. Hill (1983); Approaches to Teaching Keats's Poetry,
ed. by Walter H. Evert and Hack W. Rhodes (1991); Junkets on a
sad Planet by Tom Clark (1993); John Keats by Robert Woof (1997);
The Dialogic Keats by Michael J. Sider (1998); Keats's Odes and
Contemporary Criticism by James O'Rourke (1998); The Persistence
of Poetry, ed. by Robert M. Ryan and Ronald A. Sharp (1999) -
Museums: Keat's house in London, Wentworth Place, Keats
Grove, Hampstead. Keats wrote there his greatest Odes and fell
in love with Fanny Brawne. - Note: science-fiction writer
Dan Simmons used Keats's poems Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion
as the titles of his books. The first volume was structured after
Chaucer's The Cantebury Tales. The two sections of Hyperion Cantos
take the Keats's idea about the displacement of the old gods and
the victory of new pantheon.
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