John Keats

Introduction

"He stared at the Pacific--and all his men/Looked at each other with a wild surmise--/Silent, upon a peak in Darien"; "Beauty is truth, truth beauty--that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know"; "A thing of beauty is a joy forever": the author of these and many other lines fixed permanently in the shared consciousness of those who speak English, John Keats was an extremely unlikely candidate for poetic immortality. Born into a working-class family two centuries ago, orphaned in childhood, his work subjected to vicious attacks by established literary critics, dead in his mid-twenties from tuberculosis, he overcame all obstacles, not only to write some of the finest poems in the language, but also to form, in the minds of millions of people, the paradigm of what the terms "poet" and "poetry" signify.

Early Years

John Keats was born in London on October 31, 1795, the first child of Thomas Keats, a livery-stable keeper, and his wife Frances (Jennings) Keats. Three more sons, one of whom died in infancy, and a daughter were born to the couple before Thomas's death in April 1804 in a fall from a horse. With four very young children to care for, Frances married a man named William Rawlings in 1805, but the marriage was not successful, and, when the couple separated in the following year, she and her four children went to live with her mother. John Keats received his earliest education at a private school in Enfield run by the Reverend John Clarke; among his classmates was the headmaster's son, Charles Cowden Clarke, who would be a lifelong friend. Keats's mother died of tuberculosis in February 1810, and in 1811 he was taken out of school and apprenticed to Thomas Hammond, a surgeon, at Edmonton. It was during this time that he began to read poetry seriously and to write it himself. His apprenticeship ended by mutual consent in 1815, and Keats went to London to study medicine at the joint school of St. Thomas's and Guy's Hospitals. In July 1816, he passed his examination as an apothecary, and worked until April of the next year as a medical practitioner.

Literary Career

In 1816, Keats's friend Charles Cowden Clarke introduced him to two poets who were to have a great effect on the direction of Keats's writing and his career. The first was George Chapman, dead for nearly two hundred years, whose translations of the epic poems that stand at the fountainhead of Western literature inspired Keats's first major poem, the sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer." The other was the very much alive James Henry Leigh Hunt, then in his early thirties, who had just served two years in prison for an article attacking the Prince Regent, the future King George IV. Through Leigh Hunt, Keats met a number of artists and writers, including the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, who became a close friend, and the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, from whom he held himself aloof, partly to avoid being unduly influenced, despite Shelley's interest in cultivating a friendship. Through Haydon, Keats also made the acquaintance of the essayist Charles Lamb and the poet William Wordsworth.

Keats's first volume, entitled simply Poems, was published in March 1817 and failed to attract much notice beyond a favorable review from Leigh Hunt. Amid apprentice work and imitation, the Chapman sonnet stood out as a fully realized, mature production. Later that year, Keats wrote Endymion, a mythologically-based poem in four thousand lines of rhymed couplets, on the theme of love. Published in April 1818, this work was heavily attacked later in that year in two conservative journals, Blackwood's Magazine and the Quarterly Review. In light of Keats's early death, a myth grew to the effect that he had been so disturbed by these assaults that they hastened, if they did not actually provoke, his demise. But Keats had a more robust and sensible temperament than to be done in by bad notices. Savage attacks of this nature were common at the time, the underlying motive of the criticism was more political than poetical, and Keats was aware that his poem was being used as a stick with which to beat Leigh Hunt, the real target of the reviewers' venom.

In the summer of 1818, Keats met Fanny Brawne, a young woman who, throughout what appears to have been--for him at least--a rather tormented relationship, was to be the great love of his brief life, and to whom he became engaged some time around the end of the year. By December 1818, when his brother Tom died of tuberculosis, the poet himself had begun to show early symptoms of the disease that had harrowed his family. The next year proved to be a critical one for Keats as a writer: in 1819 alone, he wrote almost all of the great poems on which his reputation rests, including "The Eve of St. Agnes," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode to a Nightingale," "To Autumn," and the sonnet "'Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art.'" All of these except "'Bright star!'" appeared in Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820), which received favorable notices in several leading periodicals. But this triumph was overshadowed by a much grimmer occurrence: on February 3, 1820, Keats had a coughing fit that led him to hemorrhage some dark arterial blood. With his medical training, he recognized the gravity of the situation, and he told his friend Charles Armitage Brown, "That drop of blood is my death-warrant; I must die."

Last Years and Legacy

After another relapse in June 1820, Keats determined to go to Italy, from whose warmer and drier climate he hoped to find some relief of his suffering. On September 18, he sailed for Naples with a close friend, the artist Joseph Severn. Keats never saw England or Fanny Brawne again. The two men took lodgings in Rome, where Severn loyally cared for Keats, who retained his gentle and uncomplaining nature until his death on February 23, 1821. He was not quite four months past his twenty-fifth birthday.

In addition to his poetry, Keats is the author of some of the most interesting letters by any literary figure. In their aesthetic theorizing, their insights into the nature of the creative process, and their constant display of a lovable and admirable personality, his letters not only complement his poetry but show an intellectual grasp and penetration that is not always evident in the poems themselves.

The life of Keats, to some degree mythologized by biographers and other enthusiasts, has done as much as anything to fashion the popular image of the poet as a doomed and tortured soul, scorned by an uncaring and philistine world, pouring out his heart in spasms of unrequited love. And his work has likewise done much to shape the common view of poetry as sensuous images expressed in rhapsodic language that, to quote his own lines on the nightingale's song, "oft-times hath/Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam/Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn." The best of his poems, of course, transcend such stereotypes. Gorgeous as their music may be, they do not traffic in pretty escapist fantasies, but instead confront some of life's most complex problems and situations, with a constant awareness of the irreducible sadness that lies at the heart of human experience.