John Keats
John Keats (October 31, 1795 – February 23, 1821) was one of the principal poets of the English Romantic movement. During his short life, his work was the subject of constant critical attacks, and it was not until much later that the significance of the cultural change which his work both presaged and helped to form was fully appreciated. Keats' poetry is characterized by an exuberant love of language and a rich, sensuous imagination; he often felt that he was working in the shadow of past poets, and only towards the end of his life was he able to produce his most original and most memorable poems.
Life
Keats was born on October 31, 1795 in Finsbury Pavement in London, where his father was an ostler. The pub is now called "The John Keats at Moorgate", only a few yards from Moorgate station. The first seven years of Keats' life were happy. The beginnings of his troubles occurred in 1804, when his father died from a fractured skull after falling from his horse. His mother remarried soon afterwards, but as quickly left the new husband and moved herself and her children to live with Keats' grandmother. There, Keats attended a school that first instilled in him a love of literature. In 1810, however, his mother died of tuberculosis, leaving him and his siblings in the custody of their grandmother.
The grandmother appointed two guardians to take care of her new charges, and these guardians removed Keats from his old school to become a surgeon's apprentice. This continued until 1814, when, after a fight with his master, he left his apprenticeship and became a student at a local hospital. During that year, he devoted more and more of his time to the study of literature. Keats traveled to the Isle of Wight in the spring of 1817, where he spent a week.
He soon found his brother, Tom Keats, entrusted to his care. Tom was, like their mother, suffering from tuberculosis. Finishing his epic poem "Endymion", Keats left to hike in Scotland and Ireland with his friend Charles Brown. However, he too began to show signs of tuberculosis infection on that trip, and returned prematurely. When he did, he found that Tom's condition had deteriorated, and that Endymion had, as had Poems before it, been the target of much abuse from the critics. In 1818, Tom Keats died from his infection, and John Keats moved again, to live in Brown's house in London. There he met Fanny Brawne, who with her mother had been staying at Brown's house, and he quickly fell in love. The later (posthumous) publication of their correspondence was to scandalise Victorian society. In the diary of Fanny Brawne was found only one sentence regarding the separation: "Mr Keats has left Hampstead."
This relationship was cut short, however, when, by 1820, Keats began to show worse signs of the disease that had plagued his family. On the suggestion of his doctors, he left the cold airs of London behind and moved to Italy with his friend Joseph Severn. Keats moved into a house on the Spanish Steps, in Rome, where despite attentive care from Severn and Dr. John Clark, the poet's health rapidly deteriorated. He died on February 23 1821 and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome. His last request was followed, and thus he was buried under a tomb stone reading "Here lies one whose name was writ in water."
Career and Criticism
His introduction to the work of Edmund Spenser, particularly The Faerie Queene, was to prove a turning point in Keats' development as a poet; it was to inspire Keats to write his first poem, Imitation of Spenser. He befriended Leigh Hunt, a poet and editor who published his first poem in 1816. In 1817, Keats published his first volume of poetry entitled simply Poems. Keats' Poems was not well received, largely due to his connection with the controversial Hunt. Keats produced some of his finest poetry during the spring and summer of 1819 including: Ode to Psyche, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on Melancholy, and To Autumn. This series of odes is among the most important poetry ever written in English, ranking with the best of Shakespeare and Milton.
Keats developed his poetic theories, chief among them Negative Capability and The Mansion of Many Apartments, in letters to friends and family. In particular, he stated he wished to be a "chameleon poet" and to resist the "egotistical sublime" of Wordsworth's writing. Oscar Wilde, the aestheticist non pareil was to later write: "[...] who but the supreme and perfect artist could have got from a mere colour a motive so full of marvel: and now I am half enamoured of the paper that touched his hand, and the ink that did his bidding, grown fond of the sweet comeliness of his charactery, for since my childhood I have loved none better than your marvellous kinsman, that godlike boy, the real Adonis of our age[..] In my heaven he walks eternally with Shakespeare and the Greeks."
William Butler Yeats was intrigued by the contrast between the "deliberate happiness" of Keats's poetry and the sadness that characterised his life. He wrote in Ego Dominus Tuus (1915):
- I see a schoolboy when I think of him,
- With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window,
- For certainly he sank into his grave
- His senses and his heart unsatisfied,
- And made – being poor, ailing and ignorant,
- Shut out from all the luxury of the world,
- The coarse-bred son of a livery-stable keeper –
- Luxurious song.
And an even greater compliment came from Wallace Stevens, who described Keats as the "Secretary for Porcelain" in Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas.
- Let the Secretary for Porcelain observe
- That evil made magic, as in catastrophe,
- If neatly glazed, becomes the same as the fruit
- Of an emperor, the egg-plant of a prince.
- The good is evil's last invention.
Bibliography
- On First Looking into Chapman's Homer (1816) text
- Sleep and Poetry (1816)
- Endymion: A Poetic Romance (1817)
- When I have fears that I may cease to be (1818) text
- Hyperion (1818)
- The Eve of St. Agnes (1819) text
- Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art (1819)
- La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad (1819) text
- Ode to Psyche (1819)
- Ode to a Nightingale (1819) text
- Ode on a Grecian Urn (1819) text
- Ode on Melancholy (1819) text
- Ode on Indolence (1819)
- Lamia (1819)
- To Autumn (1819) text
- The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream (1819)
External links
- Complete Poetical Works
- The Life of John Keats: a memoir by his friend Charles Armitage Brown
- Keats' House
- Collection of Poetry and Quotes by John Keats
- The Keats-Shelley House in Rome
- Keats' Last Letter
- Keats Biography in Chamber's Cyclopedia (1863). Includes selections from letters to and from Shelley regarding Keats
- Criticism of Keats’ La Belle Dame Sans Merci
- John-Keats.com
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