John Keats

John Keats (October 31, 1795 – February 23, 1821) was one of the principal poets of the English Romantic movement. Keats' poetry is characterized by an exuberant love of language and a rich, sensuous imagination; all of which contrasts sharply with the tragic circumstances of his short life. Keats, like his fellow Romantics, was one of the most sensitive and sensuous poets to have ever written in the language, and—although some will dispute the merits of his style—no one can argue that his poems are some of the most moving ever written.

Life

Keats was born on October 31, 1795 in Finsbury Pavement in London, where his father was an ostler. 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 make him 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.

In 1817 Keats found his brother, Tom, entrusted to his care. Tom was suffering from tuberculosis, the same disease that had killed their mother. 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 had been staying at Brown's house with her mother, and he quickly fell in love. The later (posthumous) publication of their correspondence was to scandalise Victorian society.

This relationship was cut short, however, when, by 1820, Keats began to show worsening signs of the tuberculosis 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."

Poetry

Keats' earliest major poem was the 1817 pastoral epic Endymion. The poem consists of four 1,000 line sections, written in loosely rhyming couplets. The poem tells the story of the Greek legend of the moon goddess Diana's love for the human shepherd Endymion. However, in a characterisitcally Romantic twist, Keats focuses the narrative not on Diana's love for a mortal, but Endymion's love for the unattainable goddess. This exemplifies the Romantic movement's concern with discovering idealized, almost mystical expressions of passion. In the poem, Endymion, suffering terribly from his unrequited love for Diana, engages in a romance with an earthly woman, thinking he has abandoned his goddess, only to discover that the earthly woman is in fact Diana.

Contexts 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. Spenser's work inspired Keats to write his first poem, which he even titled 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 and Other Poems|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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