john keats biography and works

(1795-1821)

Who Was John Keats?

John Keats devoted his short life to the perfection of poetry marked by vivid imagery, great sensuous appeal and an attempt to express a philosophy through classical legend. In 1818 he went on a walking tour in the Lake District. His exposure and overexertion on that trip brought on the first symptoms of the tuberculosis, which ended his life.

Early Years

A revered English poet whose short life spanned just 25 years, John Keats was born October 31, 1795, in London, England. He was the oldest of Thomas and Frances Keats’ four children. Keats lost his parents at an early age. He was eight years old when his father, a livery stable-keeper, was killed after being trampled by a horse.

His father's death had a profound effect on the young boy's life. In a more abstract sense, it shaped Keats' understanding for the human condition, both its suffering and its loss. This tragedy and others helped ground Keats' later poetry—one that found its beauty and grandeur from the human experience.

In a more mundane sense, Keats' father's death greatly disrupted the family's financial security. His mother, Frances, seemed to have launched a series of missteps and mistakes after her husband’s death; she quickly remarried and just as quickly lost a good portion of the family's wealth. After her second marriage fell apart, Frances left the family, leaving her children in the care of her mother.

She eventually returned to her children's life, but her life was in tatters. In early 1810, she died of tuberculosis.

During this period, Keats found solace and comfort in art and literature. At Enfield Academy, where he started shortly before his father's passing, Keats proved to be a voracious reader. He also became close to the school's headmaster, John Clarke, who served as a sort of a father figure to the orphaned student and encouraged Keats' interest in literature.

Back home, Keats' maternal grandmother turned over control of the family's finances, which was considerable at the time, to a London merchant named Richard Abbey. Overzealous in protecting the family's money, Abbey showed himself to be reluctant to let the Keats children spend much of it. He refused to be forthcoming about how much money the family actually had and in some cases was downright deceitful.

There is some debate as to whose decision it was to pull Keats out of Enfield, but in the fall of 1810, Keats left the school for studies to become a surgeon. He eventually studied medicine at a London hospital and became a licensed apothecary in 1816.

Early Poetry

But Keats' career in medicine never truly took off. Even as he studied medicine, Keats’ devotion to literature and the arts never ceased. Through his friend, Cowden Clarke, whose father was the headmaster at Enfield, Keats met publisher, Leigh Hunt of The Examiner .

Hunt's radicalism and biting pen had landed him in prison in 1813 for libeling Prince Regent. Hunt, though, had an eye for talent and was an early supporter of Keats poetry and became his first publisher. Through Hunt, Keats was introduced to a world of politics that was new to him and had greatly influenced what he put on the page. In honor of Hunt, Keats wrote the sonnet, "Written on the Day that Mr. Leigh Hunt Left Prison."

In addition to affirming Keats' standing as a poet, Hunt also introduced the young poet to a group of other English poets, including Percy Bysshe Shelley and Williams Wordsworth.

In 1817 Keats leveraged his new friendships to publish his first volume of poetry, Poems by John Keats . The following year, Keats' published "Endymion," a mammoth four-thousand line poem based on the Greek myth of the same name.

Keats had written the poem in the summer and fall of 1817, committing himself to at least 40 lines a day. He completed the work in November of that year and it was published in April 1818.

Keats' daring and bold style earned him nothing but criticism from two of England's more revered publications, Blackwood's Magazine and the Quarterly Review . The attacks were an extension of heavy criticism lobbed at Hunt and his cadre of young poets. The most damning of those pieces had come from Blackwood's, whose piece, "On the Cockney School of Poetry," shook Keats and made him nervous to publish "Endymion."

Keats' hesitation was warranted. Upon its publication the lengthy poem received a lashing from the more conventional poetry community. One critic called the work, the "imperturbable driveling idiocy of Endymion." Others found the four-book structure and its general flow hard to follow and confusing.

Recovering Poet

How much of an effect this criticism had on Keats is uncertain, but it is clear that he did take notice of it. But Shelley's later accounts of how the criticism destroyed the young poet and led to his declining health, however, have been refuted.

Keats in fact, had already moved beyond "Endymion" even before it was published. By the end of 1817, he was reexamining poetry's role in society. In lengthy letters to friends, Keats outlined his vision of a kind of poetry that drew its beauty from real world human experience rather than some mythical grandeur.

Keats was also formulating the thinking behind his most famous doctrine, Negative Capability , which is the idea that humans are capable of transcending intellectual or social constraints and far exceed, creatively or intellectually, what human nature is thought to allow.

In effect Keats was responding to his critics, and conventional thinking in general, which sought to squeeze the human experience into a closed system with tidy labels and rational relationships. Keats saw a world more chaotic, more creative than what others he felt, would permit.

The Mature Poet

In the summer of 1818, Keats took a walking tour in Northern England and Scotland. He returned home later that year to care for his brother, Tom, who'd fallen deeply ill with tuberculosis.

Keats, who around this time fell in love with a woman named Fanny Brawne, continued to write. He'd proven prolific for much of the past year. His work included his first Shakespearean sonnet, "When I have fears that I may cease to be," which was published in January 1818.

Two months later, Keats published "Isabella," a poem that tells the story of a woman who falls in love with a man beneath her social standing, instead of the man her family has chosen her to marry. The work was based on a story from Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio, and it's one Keats himself would grow to dislike.

His work also included the beautiful "To Autumn," a sensuous work published in 1820 that describes ripening fruit, sleepy workers, and a maturing sun. The poem, and others, demonstrated a style Keats himself had crafted all his own, one that was filled with more sensualities than any contemporary Romantic poetry.

Keats' writing also revolved around a poem he called "Hyperion," an ambitious Romantic piece inspired by Greek myth that told the story of the Titans' despondency after their losses to the Olympians.

But the death of Keats' brother halted his writing. He finally returned to the work in late 1819, rewriting his unfinished poem with a new title, "The Fall of Hyperion," which would go unpublished until more than three decades after Keats' death.

This, of course, speaks to the small audience for Keats' poetry during his lifetime. In all, the poet published three volumes of poetry during his life but managed to sell just a combined 200 copies of his work by the time of his death in 1821. His third and final volume of poetry, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems , was published in July 1820.

Final Years and Death

In 1819 Keats contracted tuberculosis. His health deteriorated quickly. Soon after his last volume of poetry was published, he ventured off to Italy with his close friend, the painter Joseph Severn, on the advice of his doctor, who had told him he needed to be in a warmer climate for the winter.

The trip marked the end of his romance with Brawne. His health issues and his own dreams of becoming a successful writer had stifled their chances of ever getting married.

Keats arrived in Rome in November of that year and for a brief time started to feel better. But within a month, he was back in bed, suffering from a high temperature. The last few months of his life proved particularly painful for the poet.

His doctor in Rome placed Keats on a strict diet that consisted of a single anchovy and a piece of bread per day in order to limit the flow of blood to the stomach. He also induced heavy bleeding, resulting in Keats suffering from both a lack of oxygen and a lack of food.

Keats' agony was so severe that at one point he pressed his doctor and asked him, "How long is this posthumous existence of mine to go on?"

Keats' death came on February 23, 1821. It's believed he was clutching the hand of his friend, Severn, at the time of his passing.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: John Keats
• Birth Year: 1795
• Birth date: October 31, 1795
• Birth City: London
• Birth Country: England
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: English Romantic lyric poet John Keats was dedicated to the perfection of poetry marked by vivid imagery that expressed a philosophy through classical legend.
• Fiction and Poetry
• Astrological Sign: Scorpio
• Death Year: 1821
• Death date: February 23, 1821
• Death City: Rome
• Death Country: Italy

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CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: John Keats Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
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• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: November 12, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014
• If Poetry comes not as naturally as Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.

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Biography of John Keats, English Romantic Poet

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John Keats (October 31, 1795– February 23, 1821) was an English Romantic poet of the second generation, alongside Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. He is best known for his odes, including "Ode to a Grecian Urn," "Ode to a Nightingale," and his long form poem Endymion . His usage of sensual imagery and statements such as “beauty is truth and truth is beauty” made him a precursor of aestheticism. 

Fast Facts: John Keats

• Known For: Romantic poet known for his search for perfection in poetry and his use of vivid imagery. His poems are recognized as some of the best in the English language.
• Born​: October 31, 1795 in London, England
• Parents: Thomas Keats and Frances Jennings
• Died​: February 23, 1821 in Rome, Italy
• Education​: King's College, London
• Selected Works: “Sleep and Poetry” (1816), “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819), “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819 ), “Hyperion” (1818-19), Endymion (1818)
• Notable Quote​: "Beauty is truth, truth is beauty,'—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." 

John Keats was born in London on October 31, 1795. His parents were Thomas Keats, a hostler at the stables at the Swan and Hoop Inn, which he would later manage, and Frances Jennings. He had three younger siblings: George, Thomas, and Frances Mary, known as Fanny. His father died in April 1804 in a horse riding accident, without leaving a will.

In 1803, Keats was sent to John Clarke's school in Enfield, which was close to his grandparents’ house and had a curriculum that was more progressive and modern than what was found in similar institutions. John Clarke fostered his interest in classical studies and history. Charles Cowden Clarke, who was the headmaster’s son, became a mentor figure for Keats, and introduced him to Renaissance writers Torquato Tasso, Spenser, and the works of George Chapman. A temperamental boy, young Keats was both indolent and belligerent, but starting at age 13, he channeled his energies into the pursuit of academic excellence, to the point that, in midsummer 1809, he won his first academic prize.

When Keats was 14, his mother died of tuberculosis, and Richard Abbey and Jon Sandell were appointed as the children's guardians. That same year, Keats left John Clarke to become an apprentice to surgeon and apothecary Thomas Hammond, who was the doctor of his mother’s side of the family. He lived in the attic above Hammond’s practice until 1813.

Keats wrote his first poem, “An Imitation of Spenser,” in 1814, aged 19. After finishing his apprenticeship with Hammond, Keats enrolled as a medical student at Guy’s Hospital in October 1815. While there, he started assisting senior surgeons at the hospital during surgeries, which was a job of significant responsibility. His job was time consuming and it hindered his creative output, which caused significant distress. He had ambition as a poet, and he admired the likes of Leigh Hunt and Lord Byron.

He received his apothecary license in 1816, which allowed him to be a professional apothecary, physician, and surgeon, but instead, he announced to his guardian that he would pursue poetry. His first printed poem was the sonnet “O Solitude,” which appeared in Leigh Hunt’s magazine The Examiner. In the summer of 1816, while vacationing with Charles Cowden Clarke in the town of Margate, he started working on “Caligate.” Once that summer was over, he resumed his studies to become a member of the Royal College of Surgeons. 

Poems (1817)

Sleep and poetry.

What is more gentle than a wind in summer? What is more soothing than the pretty hummer That stays one moment in an open flower, And buzzes cheerily from bower to bower? What is more tranquil than a musk-rose blowing In a green island, far from all men's knowing? More healthful than the leafiness of dales? More secret than a nest of nightingales? More serene than Cordelia's countenance? More full of visions than a high romance? What, but thee Sleep? Soft closer of our eyes! Low murmurer of tender lullabies! Light hoverer around our happy pillows! Wreather of poppy buds, and weeping willows! Silent entangler of a beauty's tresses! Most happy listener! when the morning blesses Thee for enlivening all the cheerful eyes That glance so brightly at the new sun-rise(“Sleep and Poetry,” lines 1-18)

Thanks to Clarke, Keats met Leigh Hunt in October of 1816, who, in turn introduced him to Thomas Barnes, editor of the Times, conductor Thomas Novello, and the poet John Hamilton Reynolds. He published his first collection, Poems, which includes “Sleep and poetry” and “I stood Tiptoe,” but it was panned by the critics. Charles and James Ollier, the publishers, felt ashamed of it, and the collection aroused little interest. Keats promptly went to other publishers, Taylor and Hessey, who strongly supported his work and, one month after the publication of Poems , he already had an advance and a contract for a new book. Hessey also became a close friend of Keats. Through him and his partner, Keats met the Eton-educated lawyer Richard Woodhouse, a fervent admirer of Keats who would serve as his legal advisor. Woodhouse became an avid collector of Keats-related materials, known as Keatsiana, and his collection is, to this day, one of the most important sources of informations on Keats' work. The young poet also became part of William Hazlitt’s circle, which cemented his reputation as an exponent of a new school of poetry.

Upon formally leaving his hospital training in December 1816, Keats' health took a major hit. He left the damp rooms of London in favor of the village of Hampstead in April 1817 to live with his brothers, but both he and his brother George ended up taking care of their brother Tom, who had contracted tuberculosis. This new living situation brought him close to Samuel T. Coleridge, an elder poet of the first generation of Romantics, who lived in Highgate. On April 11, 1818, the two took a walk together on Hampstead Heath, where they talked about “nightingales, poetry, poetical sensation, and metaphysics.” 

In the Summer of 1818, Keats started touring Scotland, Ireland, and the Lake District, but by July of 1818, while on the Isle of Mull, he caught a terrible cold that debilitated him to the point that he had to return South. Keats' brother, Tom, died of Tuberculosis on December 1st, 1818.

A Great Year (1818-19)

Ode on a grecian urn.

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, Sylvan historian, who canst thus express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme: What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape Of deities or mortals, or of both, In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

“Ode on a Grecian Urn,” lines 1—10

Keats moved to Wentworth place, on the edge of Hampstead Heath, the property of his friend Charles Armitage Brown. This is the period when he wrote his most mature work: five out of his six great odes were composed in the Spring of 1819: "Ode to Psyche," "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode on Melancholy," "Ode on Indolence." In 1818, he also published Endymion, which, much like Poems, was not appreciated by critics. Harsh assessments include “imperturbable drivelling idiocy” by John Gibson Lockhart for The Quarterly Review, who also thought that Keats would have been better off resuming his career as an apothecary, deeming “to be a starved apothecary” a wiser thing than a starved poet. Lockhart was also the one who lumped together Hunt, Hazlitt, and Keats as member as “the Cockney School,” which was spiteful of both their poetic style and their lack of a traditional elite education that also signified belonging to the aristocracy or upper class.

At some point in 1819, Keats was so short on money that he considered becoming a journalist or a surgeon on a ship. In 1819, he also wrote "The Eve of St. Agnes," "La Belle Dame sans Merci," "Hyperion," "Lamia," and the play Otho the Great. He presented these poems to his publishers for consideration for a new book project, but they were unimpressed by them. They criticized "The Eve of St. Agnes" for its "sense of pettish disgust," while they considered "Don Juan" unfit for ladies. 

Rome (1820-21)

Over the course of the year 1820, Keats’ symptoms of tuberculosis got more and more serious. He coughed up blood twice in February of 1820 and then was bled by the attending physician. Leigh Hunt took care of him, but after the summer, Keats had to agree to move to Rome with his friend Joseph Severn. The voyage, via the ship Maria Crowther, was not smooth, as dead calm alternated with storms and, upon docking, they were quarantined due to a cholera outbreak in Britain. He arrived in Rome on November 14, even though by that time, he could no longer find the warmer climate that was recommended to him for his health. Upon getting to Rome, Keats also started having stomach problems on top of respiratory problems, and he was denied opium for pain relief, as it was thought he might use it as a quick way to commit suicide. Despite Severn’s nursing, Keats was in a constant state of agony to the point that upon waking up, he would cry because he was still alive.

Keats died in Rome on February 23, 1821. His remains rest in Rome’s Protestant cemetery. His tombstone bears the inscription “Here lies One whose Name was writ in Water.” Seven weeks after the funeral, Shelley wrote the elegy Adonais, which memorialized Keats. It contains 495 lines and 55 Spenserian stanzas. 

Bright Stars: Female Acquaintances

Bright star.

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art— Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night And watching, with eternal lids apart, Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite, The moving waters at their priestlike task Of pure ablution round earth's human shores, Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask Of snow upon the mountains and the moors— No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable, Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast, To feel for ever its soft fall and swell, Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

There were two important women in John Keats’ life. The first one was Isabella Jones, whom he met in 1817. Keats was both intellectually and sexually attracted to her, and wrote about frequenting “her rooms” in the winter of 1818-19 and about their physical relationship, saying that he “warmed with her” and “kissed her” in letters to his brother George. He then met Fanny Brawne in the fall of 1818. She had talent for dressmaking, languages, and a theatrical bent. By late fall 1818, their relationship had deepened, and, throughout the following year, Keats lent her books such as Dante’s Inferno. By the summer of 1819, they had an informal engagement, mainly due to Keats’ dire straits, and their relationship remained unconsummated. In the last months of their relationship, Keats’ love took a darker and melancholic turn, and in poems such as "La Belle Dame sans Merci" and "The Eve of St. Agnes," love is closely associated with death. They parted in September 1820 when Keats, due to his deteriorating health, was advised to move to warmer climates. He left for Rome knowing that death was near: he died five months later.

The famed sonnet "Bright Star" was first composed for Isabella Jones, but he gave it to Fanny Brawne after revising it.

Themes and Literary Style

Keats often juxtaposed the comic and the serious in poems that are not primarily funny. Much like his fellow Romantics, Keats struggled with the legacy of prominent poets before him. They retained an oppressive power that hindered the liberation of the imagination. Milton is the most notable case: Romantics both worshipped him and tried to distance themselves from him, and the same happened to Keats. His first Hyperion displayed Miltonic influences, which led him to discard it, and critics saw it as a poem “that might have been written by John Milton, but one that was unmistakably by no other than John Keats.” 

Poet William Butler Yeats , in the eloquent simplicities of Per Amica Silentia Lunae , saw Keats as having “been born with that thirst for luxury common to many at the outsetting of the Romantic Movement,” and thought therefore that the poet of To Autumn “but gave us his dream of luxury.”

Keats died young, aged 25, with only a three-year-long writing career. Nonetheless, he left a substantial body of work that makes him more than a “poet of promise.” His mystique was also heightened by his alleged humble origins, as he was presented as a lowlife and someone who received a sparse education. 

Shelley, in his preface to Adonais (1821), described Keats as "delicate," "fragile," and "blighted in the bud": "a pale flower by some sad maiden cherished ... The bloom, whose petals nipt before they blew / Died on the promise of the fruit," wrote Shelley. 

Keats himself underestimated his writerly ability. "I have left no immortal work behind me—nothing to make my friends proud of my memory—but I have lov'd the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember’d," he wrote to Fanny Brawne.

Richard Monckton Milnes published the first biography of Keats in 1848, which fully inserted him into the canon. The Encyclopaedia Britannica extolled the virtues of Keats in numerous instances: in 1880, Swinburne wrote in his entry on John Keats that "the Ode to a Nightingale, [is] one of the final masterpieces of human work in all time and for all ages," while the 1888 edition stated that, "Of these [odes] perhaps the two nearest to absolute perfection, to the triumphant achievement and accomplishment of the very utmost beauty possible to human words, may be that of to Autumn and that on a Grecian Urn." In the 20th century, Wilfred Owen, W.B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot were all inspired by Keats.

As far as other arts are concerned, given how sensual his writing was, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood admired him, and painters depicted scenes of Keats poems, such as "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," "The Eve of St. Agnes," and "Isabella."

• Bate, Walter Jackson.  John Keats . Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963.
• Bloom, Harold.  John Keats . Chelsea House, 2007.
• White, Robert S.  John Keats a Literary Life . Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
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The Life and Works of John Keats

The bicentenary of Keats’s most productive years as a poet, and the period when he found inspiration, friendship and love, is an exciting opportunity to (re)discover and enjoy his works as well as engage with poetry and its ongoing relevance to us all today.

By City of London Corporation

This online exhibition has been created by Keats House, Hampstead for the #Keats200 bicentenary programme.

"Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!" (2021) by Elaine Duigenan Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

Introducing John Keats

John Keats was born and baptised in the City of London in 1795.  After education in Enfield and an apprenticeship in Edmonton, he trained to be a doctor at Guy’s Hospital before giving up a career in medicine to become a poet.

A thing of beauty is a joy forever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

From 'Endymion: A Poetic Romance', 1817

Keats House, Hampstead (2015) by Keats House Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

Keats moved to Hampstead, then a village outside of London, in 1817 and lived at Wentworth Place (now Keats House) from December 1818 to September 1820. While living there he mixed with a circle of friends who nurtured him and his work, met and fell in love with Fanny Brawne, and wrote most of the work for which he is now famous. After falling ill with consumption, he left England to go to Italy for his health but died there on 23 February 1821 at the age of just 25.

His gravestone in Rome bears the words ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water’, as he believed he had not achieved literary fame in his lifetime. Two hundred years later however, Keats is one of the best-known English Romantic poets and the works he wrote in the spring and summer of 1819 in particular, are still republished, studied, read and loved around the world.    Whether you already love his work or are new to Keats and his writing, we hope you find his genius and legacy living on through this exhibition.

John Clarke’s school, Enfield (About 1900) by E.G. Hill Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

John Keats was born in Moorgate, right on the edge of the expanding city of London. His father worked at an inn and his mother was the inn keeper’s daughter. John was the eldest child, followed by brothers George, Tom, and Edward (who died young), and finally a sister called Frances.       

Mapping John Keats's Life (2121) by Keats House Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

While the family weren’t wealthy, they could afford to send their sons to a good school. They chose John Clarke’s School in Enfield, which awarded prizes for good work instead of punishing children. This more liberal education encouraged Keats to change from a boy known for fighting to one who loved literature and poetry.  When he was eight, his father died in a riding accident while returning from visiting him at school. Within months his mother remarried, leaving her children with their grandparents. She returned five years later suffering from consumption, a common and fatal illness. Keats nursed his mother and began to study hard, believing this could help her. She died soon after leaving them as orphans.

The Keats children were given legal guardians by their grandmother but they were unable to access their inheritance. At the age of 14, Keats left school to train in medicine.  

Keats's cottage next to Thomas Hammond's house' (1925) by H. Cutner Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

Medical Training

Keats left school aged 14 to begin a career in medicine. He was apprenticed to Dr Thomas Hammond in Edmonton, who taught Keats to diagnose illnesses, prepare remedies and perform minor surgery.  

Two pages from John Keats’s medical notebook (1815) by John Keats Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

At the end of his apprenticeship, Keats returned to London to continue his medical training at Guy’s Hospital. Keats was a good student and was awarded the prestigious role of surgeon’s dresser, which involved assisting at amputations and dressing wounds. Witnessing operations performed before anaesthetics and antibiotics influenced his later writing on human suffering.

He passed his medical exams in 1816 at the age of 20, but was becoming increasingly drawn to a career as a poet. While studying at Guy’s he met the influential journalist Leigh Hunt, who was to become a great friend of Keats, and champion of his poetry. Keats’s first published  poem, ‘To Solitude’ appeared in Hunt’s journal The Examiner in May 1816, two months before passing his medical exams.       By the end of 1816 Keats could no longer balance both his work at the hospital and his writing. He chose poetry. While his guardians were appalled, Keats began to find support in a new circle of writers, artists and journalists living in Hampstead.   

O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell, Let it not be among the jumbled heap Of murky buildings; climb with me the steep, – Nature’s observatory – whence the dell, Its flowery slopes, its river’s crystal swell, May seem a span; let me thy vigils keep ’Mongst boughs pavillion’d, where the deer’s swift leap Startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell. But though I’ll gladly trace these scenes with thee, Yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind, Whose words are images of thoughts refin’d, Is my soul’s pleasure; and it sure must be Almost the highest bliss of human-kind, When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee.

‘To Solitude’, 1816

A view of the Vale of Health, Hampstead Heath (About 1800) by Francis John Sarjent Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

Wentworth Place, Hampstead

The Keats brothers, John, George and Tom, moved from Southwark to Hampstead in 1817, initially to benefit from its healthier environment. Situated eight miles outside London, it was then a small village, or more accurately, villages, on the edge of the Heath, which was already a popular leisure destination for Londoners. Keats was also attracted by the literary people who lived there, including Leigh Hunt who was living in the Vale of Health at that time.    

"Keats's Corner" Well Walk' (About 1875) by Frederick Cook Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

On 1 December 1818, John Keats’s brother Tom died of consumption at their lodgings in Well Walk, Hampstead.  John walked to Wentworth Place to tell his friends the Dilke family and Charles Brown the news and was invited by Brown to come and live with him at the house.  

‘Wentworth Place, Ham[p]stead’ (About 1890) by Fred Holland Day Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

Keats lived at Wentworth Place on and off until September 1820.  During this period, and inspired by his reading and surroundings, he produced many of the works for which he is now famous. He also found friendship with a creative, literary circle who championed his writing and encouraged him to work. Most significantly, while living in Hampstead he met and fell in love with Fanny Brawne, who lived at the house from April 1819 to December 1831.

Portrait miniature of Fanny Brawne (About 1833) by Anonymous Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

Fanny Brawne

In April 1819, the Dilke family moved out of Wentworth Place and rented their side of the house to Mrs Brawne and her three children, including the eldest daughter Fanny.

Engagement ring given to Fanny Brawne by John Keats (Late 18th, early 19th century?) Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

Fanny Brawne and Keats first met some time in late 1818. The Brawne family had rented Brown’s home for the summer while Keats and Brown were walking in Scotland. On Brown’s return, the family took another house nearby in Hampstead and continued to visit their friends at Wentworth Place.  After she moved back to Wentworth Place, and now separated only by a wall, the two fell deeply in love. It is not known when they exchanged rings, but we do know that Keats wrote 39 love letters to her between April 1819 and September 1820. 

The spring and summer of 1819 was a remarkably productive period in Keats’s life, inspired in large part by his love for Fanny Brawne. Even after he became seriously ill from February 1820, he continued to write letters to her despite being told by his doctors not to read or write poetry, in case it distressed him.

Fanny Brawne saw Keats for the last time on 13 September 1820, when he left for Rome. She continued to live in the house until a few years after her mother’s death in 1829.

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art – Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night, And watching, with eternal lids apart, Like nature’s patient, sleepless eremite, The moving waters at their priestlike task Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores, Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask Of snow upon the mountains and the moors; No – yet still stedfast, still unchangeable, Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast, To feel for ever its soft swell and fall, Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever – or else swoon to death.

‘Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art’, 1819

Keats’s Parlour (2015) by Keats House Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

The Poems of 1819

Keats wrote some of the finest poems in the English language in one phenomenally creative period from September 1818 to September 1819.  He was just 23. 

John Keats' (1819) by Charles Brown Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

Despite being hampered by family tragedy, continued money worries and literary criticism, Keats began and revised his epic poem ‘Hyperion’, composed two long narrative poems, sonnets, a ballad, a play and six exceptional odes.

Inspired by the loss of his brother Tom and the beauty, friendship and love he found in Hampstead, his poems of that year are both sad and uplifting at the same time, beautifully demonstrating how sorrow and happiness exist together. He was skilled enough to write about different subjects in different types of verse, yet his poems all show his love of nature and his belief in how powerful the human imagination is.  He seems to say that though everything in life fades, we still have beauty, an idea he represented in his poems through a malicious maiden or the melodic song of a nightingale.

‘Keats Listening to the Nightingale on Hampstead Heath’ (1849) by Joseph Severn Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

Critical Responses

Most of the poems Keats wrote between 1817 and 1819 were criticised by the conservative, literary establishment of the day. 

As a follower of Leigh Hunt, he was mockingly referred to as a ‘Cockney poet’, with the Tory paper the ‘Quarterly’ calling him

‘more unintelligible,… twice as diffuse and ten times more tiresome and absurd than his prototype’.

Keats only published three books of poetry during his lifetime. The publication of his first book, ‘Poems’ in 1817, mostly went unnoticed while reviews of ‘Endymion’ the following year, attacked both the poem itself and Keats personally. One critic questioned whether someone of his background should write about classical subjects and suggested that he should abandon all hope of being a poet.

The critical response to his last book , ‘Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems’ published in 1820, was more positive. The respected ‘Edinburgh Review’ praised the collection’s imaginative power and beauty of expression and Charles Lamb writing in the ‘New Times’, compared Keats favourably to Dante, Chaucer and Spenser.

The ‘Lamia’ volume contains many of the poems written during 1819 and is now seen as one of the strongest collections of poetry ever published. Sadly, Keats never knew the pleasure the poetry in this volume would later bring to so many people. The reviews at the time were not positive enough to make his work widely popular and fully understood by the public, and worsening symptoms of consumption meant that Keats wrote no more poetry after 1820.

Tuberculous lungs (1830s) by Robert Carswell Original Source: https://www.wellcomecollection.org

Keats and Consumption

In February 1820 Keats realised he had consumption, now known as tuberculosis or simply TB. There was no known cause, though many believed it was hereditary and that sensitive or creative people were more likely to be affected.  

‘The Maria Crowther, Sailing Brig’ (1820) by Joseph Severn Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

Keats probably contracted the illness in 1818 while nursing his brother Tom, but the disease lay dormant throughout 1819 allowing time for his most creative and brilliant writing. However, from February 1820 his health deteriorated, destroying his hopes for literary success. Keats was initially prescribed rest, a starvation diet and bloodletting, but this only made him weaker. He was also told to stop reading or writing poetry in case it over excited him. 

 As was common practice, Keats was advised to go abroad where a warmer climate could relieve his symptoms. On 17 September 1820, Keats sailed on the Maria Crowther to Italy where he intended to stay the winter. Joseph Severn, a friend and painter, accompanied Keats on his journey.

The ship made slow progress along the English Channel and the passengers had to endure being seasick as well as a violent storm. In the Mediterranean Keats suffered another haemorrhage, followed by a fever. On 21 October they finally arrived in the Bay of Naples but were forced to quarantine on board for two weeks before they could disembark. More than six weeks after leaving London they finally set foot in Italy on 31 October 1820. It was Keats’s 25th birthday. 

John Keats on his death-bed (1939) by Emery Walker after Joseph Severn Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

Death and Legacy

Keats died in Rome on 23 February 1821 aged just 25. He was buried four days later and the words ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water’ were later inscribed on his gravestone, as he believed he had failed in his ambition to be a great poet.

Keats published just three books of poetry in his lifetime but was also a prolific writer of letters, many of which survived providing a glimpse into the life and character of both him and the society he lived within.

When Keats died his writing was not well known beyond his circle of friends. It was through their love and dedication that many of his manuscripts survived.

I shall soon be laid in the quiet grave... O! I can feel the cold earth upon me - the daisies growing over me - O for this quiet - it will be my first -

Keats quoted in a letter from Joseph Severn to John Taylor, 6 March 1821.

After the first biography of Keats was published in 1848, the Pre-Raphaelite painters began to take an interest in his work. Keats’s sensuous imagery inspired them to paint scenes from his poems, bringing them to a wider audience.

By the 1880s Keats’s poetry was becoming increasingly popular and enthusiasts wanted to find his Hampstead home. A dedication plaque was added above the front door in 1896. When the house was threatened with demolition in 1920, the Keats Memorial House Fund raised enough money to save it. It opened to the public on 9 May 1925 and, today, Keats House is provided by the City of London Corporation as part of its contribution to the cultural life of London and the nation.

Despite changing tastes in literature over the last 200 years, Keats’s poetry is still fresh and meaningful. His life was short, yet he created some of the most enduring poems in the English language. We now celebrate him as one of the world’s finest poets.

From ‘Endymion: A Poetic Romance’, 1817

Keats's Desk (2015) by Keats House Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

We hope you enjoyed this exploration of John Keats's life.

If you'd like to learn more, visit Our City Together , where you will find in-depth articles covering specific periods in Keats's life, his letters, poetry and friends. 

Introducing Keats200

The Keats200 bicentenary is a celebration of Keats’s life, works and legacy, beginning in December 2018 through to February 2021 and beyond. It is led by three major partners – Keats House, Hampstead, The Keats Foundation and the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association – and is open to all individuals and organisations who have an interest in Keats or poetry.

One Keats200 project has been with photographer and artist, Elaine Duigenan. As Artist in Residence during 2020, Elaine has been inspired by the garden and collections at Keats House, Hampstead. She has created new artworks drawing on themes associated with Keats’s life and works. Two of these are featured in this display and Keats House would like to thank Elaine for permission to use these beautiful works of art to help engage us with the events of 200 years ago.

Today, Keats House is managed by the City of London Corporation and is a registered charity (1053381).

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English Romantic poet John Keats was born on October 31, 1795, in London. The oldest of four children, he lost both his parents at a young age. His father, a livery-stable keeper, died when Keats was eight; his mother died of tuberculosis six years later. After his mother’s death, Keats’s maternal grandmother appointed two London merchants, Richard Abbey and John Rowland Sandell, as guardians. Abbey, a prosperous tea broker, assumed the bulk of this responsibility, while Sandell played only a minor role. When Keats was fifteen, Abbey withdrew him from the Clarke School, Enfield, to apprentice with an apothecary-surgeon and study medicine in a London hospital. In 1816 Keats became a licensed apothecary, but he never practiced his profession, deciding instead to write poetry.

Around this time, Keats met Leigh Hunt, an influential editor of the Examiner , who published his sonnets “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” and “O Solitude.” Hunt also introduced Keats to a circle of literary men, including the poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Wordsworth . The group’s influence enabled Keats to see his first volume, Poems by John Keats , published in 1817. Shelley, who was fond of Keats, had advised him to develop a more substantial body of work before publishing it. Keats, who was not as fond of Shelley, did not follow his advice. Endymion , a four-thousand-line erotic/allegorical romance based on the Greek myth of the same name, appeared the following year. Two of the most influential critical magazines of the time, the Quarterly Review and Blackwood’s Magazine , attacked the collection. Calling the romantic verse of Hunt’s literary circle “the Cockney school of poetry,” Blackwood’s declared Endymion to be nonsense and recommended that Keats give up poetry. Shelley, who privately disliked Endymion but recognized Keats’s genius, wrote a more favorable review, but it was never published. Shelley also exaggerated the effect that the criticism had on Keats, attributing his declining health over the following years to a spirit broken by the negative reviews.

Keats spent the summer of 1818 on a walking tour in Northern England and Scotland, returning home to care for his brother, Tom, who suffered from tuberculosis. While nursing his brother, Keats met and fell in love with a woman named Fanny Brawne. Writing some of his finest poetry between 1818 and 1819, Keats mainly worked on “Hyperion,” a Miltonic blank-verse epic of the Greek creation myth. He stopped writing “Hyperion” upon the death of his brother, after completing only a small portion, but in late 1819 he returned to the piece and rewrote it as “The Fall of Hyperion” (unpublished until 1856). That same autumn Keats contracted tuberculosis, and by the following February he felt that death was already upon him, referring to the present as his “posthumous existence.”

In July 1820, he published his third and best volume of poetry, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems . The three title poems, dealing with mythical and legendary themes of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance times, are rich in imagery and phrasing. The volume also contains the unfinished “Hyperion,” and three poems considered among the finest in the English language, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode on Melancholy,” and “Ode to a Nightingale.” The book received enthusiastic praise from Hunt, Shelley, Charles Lamb, and others, and in August, Frances Jeffrey, influential editor of the Edinburgh Review , wrote a review praising both the new book and Endymion .

The fragment “Hyperion” was considered by Keats’s contemporaries to be his greatest achievement, but by that time he had reached an advanced stage of his disease and was too ill to be encouraged. He continued a correspondence with Fanny Brawne and—when he could no longer bear to write to her directly—her mother, but his failing health and his literary ambitions prevented their getting married. Under his doctor’s orders to seek a warm climate for the winter, Keats went to Rome with his friend, the painter Joseph Severn. He died there on February 23, 1821, at the age of twenty-five, and was buried in the Protestant cemetery.

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John Keats (1795-1821) Biography: Facts and Complete works

John Keats, an English romantic poet , had a short life filled with tragedy from a young age. His experience and emotions are seen in his poetry. He was dedicated to poetry and he devoted his short life to the perfection of poetry. His poems were marked with intense and rich imagery as well as melodic beauty.

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Keats was born on October 31, 1795 in London. Keats’s father had crossed the social barrier and married his mother and he was known for his charm, energy and respectability. Keats’s parents were affectionate and loving towards their children. He lost his father in 1804 and mother in 1810.

In 1811, Keats joined as an apprentice to a druggist in Edmonton, England. Keats devotion to arts and poetry could not seize even while he was studying medicine. Keats produced his first write-up – short poem entitled “Imitation of Spenser”, inspired by Edmund Spenser’s “Faerie Queene”.  Keats was introduced to a group of English poets by a publisher, Hunt, which included Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Wordsworth .

The Poet Keats  

Keats first volume of poetry was published in 1817 as “ Poems by John Keats ”. The same year he published “ Endymion ”. However, Keats’ daring and bold style brought criticism from two of England’s most well-regarded publications, Blackwood’s Magazine and Quarterly Review. Some of the readers did not like the lengthy poem and even found the general flow hard to follow as well as confusing.

Even though Keats’ poems were not received well by the critics, he kept on writing. By the end of 1817, he started re-examining the role of poetry in society. He visioned a kind of poetry that illustrated its beauty from the real world and human experiences. However, in summer 1818, Keats returned home to take care of his brother, Tom, who was suffering from tuberculosis. By this time, he had fallen in love with Fanny. He continued to write.

In fact, his reputation grew after death and by the end of the nineteenth century, he became one of the most loved English poets. The poetry of Keats is recognized by sensual imagery. The first Shakespearean Sonnet was published in January 1818, “When I have fears that I may cease to be”. Two months later, Keats published “Isabella”, a poem that describes a woman who falls in love with a man below her social level.

In the later half of 1819, Keats wrote his only drama, “Otho the Great”. A sensuous work “The Autumn” was published in 1820 and with this Keats crafted a style of his own which was filled with more sensualities than other contemporary poets. The last long poem Keats wrote was “Lamia”.

Later in life

His health started declining and in September 1820, Keats left for Italy on an invitation from P B Shelley, a poet and his friend. He had promised Fanny to marry her after he returned and they had planned to live together. However, he died in Rome on February 23, 1821. He was just twenty-five years of age at that time.

Keats’s poems are filled with an inexplicable yet uplifting sense of beauty and happiness. His works explore immense possibilities but do not cover enduring problems of life. Keats wanted to experience life and not go after its perfect understanding.

Letters written by John Keats

There are about two hundred and forty of Keats’s letters survive. Here is a list of Keats’ letters with the text of each of the letters (upcoming). There is brief summary and background of each of the letters. Reproduction of letters is the word for word.

John Keats’ Letters sent to Benjamin Bailey (1791-1853)

Letter on 8 October 1817 Letter on 13 March 1818 Letter on 21, 25 May 1818 Letter on 10 June 1818

Letters sent by John Keats to Frances (Fanny) Brawne (1800-1865)

Fanny Brawne, 11 October 1819 Fanny Brawne, 13 October 1819 Fanny Brawne, 19 October 1819 Fanny Brawne, February 1820 collection Fanny Brawne, March 1820 collection Fanny Brawne, May 1820 collection

John Keats’ letters to Charles Brown (1787-1842)

To Charles Brown, 30 September 1820 To Charles Brown, 1 November 1820 To Charles Brown, 30 November 1820

John Keats’ letter to Charles Cowden Clarke (1787-1877)

Letter to Charles Wentworth Dilke (1789-1864)

Letter to William Haslam (1795/1798(?)-1851)

Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786-1846) To Benjamin Robert Haydon, 10-11 May 1817 To Benjamin Robert Haydon, 23 January 1818 This page also includes a note to John Taylor. To Benjamin Robert Haydon, 8 April 1818

James Henry Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) To Leigh Hunt, 10 May 1817

Frances Mary (Fanny) Keats (1803-1889) To Fanny Keats, 26 (?) October 1819 To Fanny Keats, 8 February 1820 To Fanny Keats, 14 February 1820 To Fanny Keats, 20 March 1820 To Fanny Keats, 11 September 1820

George Keats (1797-1841)

George Keats and Georgiana Augusta Wylie Keats (1798-1879) To George and Georgiana Keats, September 1819

Thomas Keats (1799-1818) To Thomas Keats, 25-27 June 1818

John Hamilton Reynolds (1794-1852) John Hamilton Reynolds, 17-18 April 1817 John Hamilton Reynolds, 22 November 1817 John Hamilton Reynolds, 3 May 1818 John Hamilton Reynolds, 28 February 1820

James Rice (1792-1832)

Joseph Severn (1793-1879)

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) To Percy Bysshe Shelley, 16 August 1820

John Taylor (1781-1864) To John Taylor, 11 June 1820

Richard Woodhouse (1788-1834)

Poems by John Keats

(published in 1817) Dedication. To Leigh Hunt «I stood tip-toe upon a little hill.» Specimen of an Induction to a Poem Calidore. A Fragment To some Ladies On receiving a curious Shell, and a Copy of Verses, from the same Ladies To * * * * [Georgiana Augusta Wylie, afterwards Mrs. George Keats] To Hope Imtiation of Spenser « Woman! when I behold thee flippant, vain»

To George Felton Mathew To my Brother George To Charles Cowden Clarke

I. To my Brother George II. To * * * * * * [«Had I a mans’s fair form»] III. Written on the day that Mr. Leigh Hunt left Prison IV. «How many bards gild the lapses of time!» V. To a Friend who sent me some Roses VI. To G. A. W. [Georgiana Augusta Wylie] VII. O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell, VIII. To my Brothers IX. Keen, fitful gusts are whisp’ring here and there X. To one who has been long in city pent XI. On first looking into Chapmans’s Homer XII. On leaving some Friends at an early Hour XIII. Addressed to Haydon XIV. Addressed to the same XV. On the Grasshopper an Cricket XVI. To Kosciusko XVII. «Happy is England!»

Lamia, Isabella, &c. (published 1820) Lamia Part I Lamia Part II Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil The Eve of St. Agnes Ode to a Nightingale Ode on a Grecian Urn Ode to Psyche Fancy Ode [«Bards of Passion and of Mirth»] Lines on the Mermaid Tavern Robin Hood. To a friend. To Autumn Ode on Melancholy Hyperion Part I Hyperion Part II Hyperion Part III

Endymion: A Poetic Romance (published 1818)

Preface by Keats Book I Book II Book III Book IV

Posthumous Poems

On death Women, Wine, and Snuff When I have fears that I may cease to be To Byron To Chatterton Ode to Apollo Sonnet (Oh! how I love,on a fair summer’s eve…) Written in disgust of vulgar superstition On the Sea The Poet – A Fragment Modern Love A Song of Opposites To a cat Lines on seeing a Lock of Milton’s Hair A Song of Opposites On sitting down to read King Lear once again In a drear-nighted December Asleep! O sleep a little while, white pearl! La Belle Dame Sans Merci The Human Seasons Two Sonnets on Fame Sonnet (When I have Fears that I may cease to be) Sharing Eve’s apple A draught of Sunshine To the Nile To a Lady seen for a few Moments at Vauxhall The human seasons Epistle to John Hamilton Reynolds Fragment of an Ode to Maia, written of May Day, 1818 Meg Merrilies Staffa Written upon the Top of Ben Nevis Translation from a Sonnet of Ronsard To George Keats in America Stanzas Ode to Fanny I had a Dove Ode on Indolence Sonnet (Why did I laugh tonight?) A Dream, after reading Dante’s Episode of Paulo and Francesca La Belle Dame sans Merci You say you love The Fall of Hyperion

Naughty Boy: A Song About Myself

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Home » About Keats

About Keats

He was born at Moorfields, London, on 31 October 1795 to Thomas Keats, a livery stable manager, and his wife Frances Jennings. He had three brothers, all younger than him: George, Tom, Edward (who died in childhood), and a sister, Frances. Their father was killed in a riding accident in 1804, and their mother succumbed six years later to ‘a rheumatism’ (probably tuberculosis). After seven years at Clarke’s academy, Enfield, Keats was apprenticed to Thomas Hammond, a surgeon neighbour of his maternal grandmother in Edmonton. He began his formal medical training at Guy’s Hospital in October 1815, where he managed to combine his studies with an extraordinary output of poetry. Within weeks of enrolling he was informed that he would be promoted to the senior rank of Dresser from March 1816, thus becoming an Assistant Surgeon at the age of 20. A newspaper report dating from that month reported that ‘Mr. Keats’, one of the surgeons at Guy’s Hospital, had saved a woman’s life by extracting a pistol ball from her neck.

Keats’s first published poem, the sonnet ‘To Solitude’, appeared in The Examiner newspaper on 5 May 1816; the following October he met the paper’s editor, Leigh Hunt, who said he was ‘fairly astonished’ at the quality of Keats’s writing. Hunt’s article, ‘Young Poets’, appeared in The Examiner on 3 December bringing Keats (and Percy Shelley) to wide public notice. His first volume of poetry was published early in March 1817, by which time he had decided to forsake a medical career to get his living by poetry. Poems, by John Keats contained 30 poems presented in four sections, and culminated with his ambitious autobiographical poem ‘Sleep and Poetry’ in which he looks ahead to a ‘nobler life’ of imaginative achievement. The book also contained one poem of indisputable genius, the sonnet ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’. Later that year Blackwood’s Magazine began a series of essays denouncing what it called the ‘Cockney School’ poets and essayists associated with the writer Leigh Hunt, of which Keats was one.

1819 was one of the most fertile periods of his life, beginning with ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ in January; the poem had been suggested by his acquaintance Isabella Jones, and he wrote it at the Old Mill House, Bedhampton, close to Havant on England’s south coast. ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ came next, and May was the month of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. He was also at work on his epic, ‘Hyperion’, and in the summer months he completed ‘Lamia’. By now under the spell of his ‘Bright Star’ Fanny Brawne, he may have composed his famous sonnet at this point too. Living at Winchester during September of 1819, he composed what is arguably his greatest poem, ‘To Autumn’, the opening lines of which have become famous:

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun …

By now, however, there were unmistakable signs that he was seriously ill, fatally stricken with the ‘family disease’, tuberculosis, like his mother and brother Tom. In September of 1820 he sailed for Italy, in the hope that the milder winter weather at Rome would help him recover. An old friend, the painter Joseph Severn, loyally accompanied Keats and was at his bedside when died in Rome on 23 February 1821. Keats is buried at the non-Catholic cemetery in the city.

The second half of the nineteenth century brought increasing recognition and, eventually, the fame he had craved. He was praised by Queen Victoria’s poet laureate, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and inspired many of the Pre-Raphaelites’ poems and paintings. Wilfred Owen’s poetry owed much to Keats, and his influence can be heard in many of Seamus Heaney’s early poems.

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John Keats: Biography, Famous Poems & Other Notable Achievements

by World History Edu · September 28, 2022

John Keats may not have garnered any awards or won any significant acclaim during his lifetime, but he earned a posthumous recognition as one of the most skillful English Romantic poets. Over the course of his very brief career, he wrote tens of poems, including sonnets. Despite the fact that Keats’ life was short-lived, his impact on English literature was definitely not.

John Keats – Famous Works and Achievements. Image: Posthumous portrait of John Keats by British painter William Hilton, National Portrait Gallery, London (c. 1822)

Birth and Family

The oldest of four children, Keats was born in London in 1795. When he was still young, he lost his father in a riding accident. In 1803, Keats was put in Clarke’s school in Enfield which was only a short distance from his grandparents’ home.

At school, he loved literature, history and classical studies and was known to be quite temperamental. However, he decided to channel his energies into his academic exploits.

In 1809, he was a awarded his first prize for excelling in class. When Keats was age 14, his mother of tuberculosis. His grandparents, therefore, placed him under the guardianship of two London merchants, Sandell and Abbey. Later that year, Keats was withdrawn from school and sent to a surgeon and apothecary, Thomas Hammond, to train as an apprentice. In 1816, he became a licensed apothecary but never set up a practice as he was drawn to literature and writing.

John Keats’ Early Works

John Keats had developed a passion for arts while he was at Clarke’s and this devotion could not be quenched. In 1814, at age 19, he wrote his first poem, “An Imitation of Spencer.” The poem used the Spenserian rhyme scheme and rich imagery to paint a picture of a romantic dream world.

Keats was drawn to the works of Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth, Thomas Chatterton and Samuel Coleridge. Driven by their influence, he was set on a literary course of Romanticism for the rest of his life. Keats wrote another poem, “O Solitude,” which appeared in the magazine, The Examiner .

In 1816, he went on a vacation with author, Charles Cowden Clarke. Through Clarke, Keats got acquainted with Leigh Hunt and Thomas Barnes, the editor of the Times. Barnes published his first collection of poems which included “Sleep and Poetry” and “I stood Tiptoe.” The publications were heavily condemned by some critics that the poems’ popularity was greatly affected. Determined to succeed as a poet, Keats took his work to other publishers, Taylor and Hessey, who showed interest in his collection. The poems were published and shortly afterwards, Keats was paid an advance and signed to a contract to write a book.

John Keats was introduced to lawyer Richard Woodhouse, who became his legal advisor and eventually a passionate collector of Keats’ works. Over time, he became a great source of Keats-related information.

How did John Keats die?

In early 1820, Keats was diagnosed of pulmonary tuberculosis. Upon his doctor’s advice to get to a place where the climate was milder, he moved abroad and arrived in Rome via Naples in November 1820. His health continued to decline and on February 23, 1821, he succumbed to the disease. He was only 25.

Most Notable Works

In spite of his life being cut short at a very age, i.e. 25, the English poet was still able to produce some very remarkable works. His works – i.e. poems and letters – are revered as some of the most beloved in the English literature. The following are 5 of the most famous works by John Keats:

“To Sleep” (1816)

This poem, which focuses on sleep and death, talks about Keats’ yearning to escape from physical torment and emotional despair. In the poem, he beckons sleep to come rescue him from his suffering and to take him into her embrace before he dies. He employs personification and metaphor to paint a picture of sleep. The poem clearly portrays Keats’ desire for peace and stability.

“Bright Star” (1819)

This poem is regarded by many as the best poem by Keats. Critics and scholars are divided with regards to whether or not it was written for his love interest, Fanny Brawne. However, most would agree that she is central to the poem. “Bright Star” has a Shakespearean scope and an extraordinary peace about it. Keats, through the poem, expresses his wish to spend the rest of his life lying on his lover’s breasts. Written less than three years before his death, he alludes to both celestial and earthly elements and blends them together to produce a deeply passionate poem.

“The Eve of St. Agnes” (1819)

January 20 is the eve of St. Agnes. This poem was crafted on the basis of the myth that if an unmarried girl carried out certain rituals, she could see her future husband in her dream. The theme evolves around Keats’ idyllic view of love. It is believed that it was written following his first meeting with Brawne. The rituals referred to in this poem included saying the Lord’s prayer, fasting all day, walking backwards upstairs and other weird activities.

 “La Belle Dame sans Merci” (1819)

This is arguably Keats’ most beloved and widely anthologized poems. The French title is reminiscent of medieval escapism, bringing to mind the era of polite knights, chivalry, and beautiful but dangerous women. The woman being described in the poem is beautiful but incapable of showing mercy. Though Keats conveys a sense of mutuality between the knight and the woman, he does not show exactly how equal they are.

“To Autumn” (1820)

This was written a year before Keats’ death. It is the first line of the poem that makes it truly memorable.  Without doubt, no other poet of his time managed to use extensive personification to create such a beautiful depiction of the autumn and to express its fruitfulness. Keats is able to compress the conditions of three months into three verses. Various readers would find the natural and simple language appealing on many levels.

“Ode to a Nightingale” (1819)

Depending on which source one looks at, John Keats wrote this masterpiece either in a garden in Hampstead, London or under a plum tree in the garden of his house. The latter is according to his friend Charles Armitage Brown. It’s also been said that Keats was inspired the song of a nightingale that had built a nest in his house. Another interesting fact about “Ode to a Nightingale” is that Keats used a few hours to compose it.

In the poem, Keats communicates to the reader the pessimism that appeared to be gnawing at his soul, ushering Keats further into what he describes as a state of “negative capability”. Some of the major themes that “Ode to a Nightingale” explores are transient nature of human life. Keats’ 80-line poem touches on nature and beauty and how we are surrounded by transient things.

Keats’ most prolific period was between 1818 and 1819. Image: The first 10 lines of John Keats’ poem “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819).

Style and Themes used by John Keats

The critics of Keats may not have been very receptive of his work, yet he was regarded as one of the greatest Romantics after his death. Argentine essayist and poet, Jorge Luis Borges, for example, admitted he had his most profound experience of his literary career the first time he stumbled upon Keats’ work.

Like many traditional Romantics, Keats possessed a distinctive style of crafting his poetry with particular focus on ancient folklore, the remote past and fairy tales. He uses these features to flee the difficult realities of his life in the modern 19th century.

What makes him stand out as a poet is his ability to make the most mundane things seem most appealing to his audience through the masterly use of vivid imagery. Again, Keats’ works are usually swamped with literary devices such as metaphors, personification, alliteration and  consonance. His poem, “Ode to Nightingale,” for instance, is overwhelmed with literary devices while “Lamia” and “Hyperion” have vivid connotations of sensuality. His themes are usually about  love, death, decay, immortality, suffering and nature which are also characteristic of Romanticism.

He is widely seen as one of the most prominent poets in the English language. His woks had tremendous influence on the Romanticism movement. The London-poet ranks as one of the most quoted English poets today.

The first line of his poem, “To Autumn,” inspired writer, Neil Gaiman to start his Sandman series. His work also influenced such poets as Alfred Lord Tennyson, Millais and Rossetti.

Jane Campion’s 2009 film “Bright Star,” starring  Ben Whishaw and Abbie Cornish, features the story of John Keat’s life. Whishaw was cast as Keats while Cornish played Fanny Brawne, Keats’ love interest.

The Houghton Library of the Harvard University stores the largest collection of the manuscripts and essays of Keats. Other collections can be found at Keats’ house in Hempstead, the British Library, and the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York.

In 1896, the London-based Royal Society of Arts unveiled a plaque of Keats to honor his memory.

Did You Know?

He was friends with fellow poet P.B. Shelley. And following the death of Keats in 1821, Shelley composed a poem titled “Adonaïs: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats”. Shelley invokes the death of Adonis, a figure in Greek mythology, as a metaphor to describe the passing of John Keats.

John Keats is said to have been inspired by fellow poets such as Leigh Hunt and Lord Byron.

When Keats was eight, his father, Thomas Keats, passed away in an accident. Tragedy struck again 6 years later, when his mother, Frances Jennings, died of tuberculosis.

Between 1818 and 1819, he produced his most well-received masterpieces, including his famous six odes.

He had a romantic relationship with Fanny Brawne, whom he engaged secretly in 1819. It is said that Fanny served as his muse. Keats was absolutely devoted to Fanny; he also secured Fanny’s mother’s approval. This devotion to his fiancée, whom he described as his ‘Bright Star’, is partly captured in his poem “Endymion”, a poem that is based on love story of the moon goddess Selene and the shepherd Endymion.

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1.14.1: John Keats Biography and works Part I

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Learning Objectives

• Analyze Keats’s use of the sonnet form in “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” and “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be.”
• Identify characteristics of Romanticism in Keats’s poetry.
• Compare Keats’s use of nature with other Romantic poets.
• Recognize and identify examples of the richness of imagery for which Keats’s is known in “The Eve of St. Agnes” and “To Autumn.”

Unlike Byron and Shelley,  John Keats  came from a working class background. His father, a stable keeper, died when Keats was eight years old; his mother died of tuberculosis, then called consumption, when he was 14. Keats left school to become an apothecary’s apprentice. He left the apprenticeship to study medicine but soon decided to abandon his studies to pursue writing poetry. Keats cared for his brother Tom during his illness and death from tuberculosis, so it is not surprising that Keats also contracted the illness. Because of his medical knowledge, he recognized that he had a fatal illness.

Portrait by Joseph Severn from Letters of John Keats to His Family and Friends.   ed. Sidney Colvin. Macmillan and Co., Limited. St. Martin’s Street, London, 1925

Keats became acquainted with other writers such as Shelley and literary figures such as Leigh Hunt, in whose journal Keats published his first poem. Keats’s early work was not well received. Several of Keats’s friends, in fact, blamed discouragement caused by the harsh criticism for hastening the poet’s death.

After his brother’s death and with his own health deteriorating, Keats moved into a house in Hampstead with his friend Brown. Through Brown, Keats met  Fanny Brawne , the love of his life. The Brawne family rented the attached house next door to Brown’s house.

During the year he lived here, Keats produced his greatest poetry including “The Eve of St. Agnes,” “Ode to Psyche,” “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode on Melancholy,” “Lamia,”  The Fall of Hyperion , and “To Autumn.” Many critics have noted that Keats produced more great poetry in a year than many poets produce in a lifetime.

Views of the interior of Keats’s house in Hampstead, London, now a museum.

Realizing that his health was failing, Keats decided to move to Rome, hoping that the warmer, drier climate would improve his condition. He traveled to Rome with his friend, artist Joseph Severn. They moved into rooms next to the Spanish Steps, rooms which now house the Keats-Shelley House museum.

Only a few months after his arrival in Rome,  Keats died  with his friend Severn in attendance and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. At his request, his name was not carved into his grave stone. Keats requested that his marker read, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” Severn, who was later buried next to Keats, and Brown decided to add the following inscription to the memorial:

This Grave contains all that was mortal, of a YOUNG ENGLISH POET, who on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his heart, at the Malicious Power of his enemies, desired these words to be Engraven on his Tomb Stone

Severn’s drawing of Keats on his death bed.

These words fueled stories that Keats’s death was hastened by his despair over the brutal critical reviews of his poetry. Shelley’s elegy  Adonais  includes verses attributing Keats’s death to his agitation over the reviews, also adding substance to the stories. A post-mortem, however, revealed that Keats’s lungs had been almost entirely destroyed by tuberculosis.

The graves of Keats and Severn in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome.

• “ The Eve of St. Agnes .”  Bartleby.com . rpt. from  The Poetical Works of John Keats . London. Macmillan.1884.
• “ The Eve of St. Agnes .”  Representative Poetry Online . Ian Lancashire. Department of English, University of Toronto. University of Toronto Libraries.
• “ Ode to a Nightingale .”  Keats-Shelley House . text and audio.
• “ Ode to a Nightingale .”  Representative Poetry Online . Ian Lancashire. Department of English, University of Toronto. University of Toronto Libraries.
• “ On Seeing the Elgin Marbles .”  Representative Poetry Online . Ian Lancashire. Department of English, University of Toronto. University of Toronto Libraries.
• The Poems of John Keats . Ed. E. De Selincourt. New York. Dodd, Mead and Co. 1909.  Hathi Trust Digital Library .
• Poems Published in 1820 by John Keats . Ed. M. Robertson.  Project Gutenberg .
• “ To Autumn .”  Representative Poetry Online . Ian Lancashire. Department of English, University of Toronto. University of Toronto Libraries.
• “ To Autumn .”  Keats-Shelley House . text and audio.
• “ When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be .” Keats’ Literary Reputation. British Library. text and audio.
• “ When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be .”  Representative Poetry Online . Ian Lancashire. Department of English, University of Toronto. University of Toronto Libraries.

“On Seeing the Elgin Marbles”

Even as a very young man, Keats seemed tragically aware of death and of his own mortality, as might be expected in one who had suffered loss of immediate family members. Although the subject of this sonnet is the Elgin Marbles, the focus in the first line is on approaching death. In line 5, the poet compares himself to a sick eagle, looking at the sky, longing to fly, yet unable to do so. In contrast to his own brief life span, the marbles are centuries old, yet even they are marked and worn by time.

Video Clip 9

John Keats.wmv

(click to see video)

View a video mini-lecture about “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles.”

My spirit is too weak—mortality

   Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,

   And each imagined pinnacle and steep

Of godlike hardship tells me I must die

Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.

   Yet ‘tis a gentle luxury to weep

   That I have not the cloudy winds to keep

Fresh for the opening of the morning’s eye.

Such dim-conceived glories of the brain

   Bring round the heart an undescribable feud;

So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,

   That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude

Wasting of old time—with a billowy main—

   A sun—a shadow of a magnitude.

   Yet ‘tis a gentle luxury to weep,

   That I have not the cloudy winds to keep,

   Bring round the heart an indescribable feud;

Wasting of old Time—with a billowy main—

“When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be”

“When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be” is an English sonnet; Keats was more interested in form than many of the Romantic poets, which in turn made him interesting to many Victorian poets who experimented with form. The sonnet consists of three quatrains, each beginning with “when,” and a final couplet, which begins with “then.”

When I have fears that I may cease to be

  Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,

Before high piled books, in charact’ry,

  Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;

When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,

  Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,

And think that I may never live to trace

  Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;

And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!

  That I shall never look upon thee more,

Never have relish in the faery power

  Of unreflecting love!—then on the shore

Of the wide world I stand alone, and think

Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

“The Eve of St. Agnes”

“The Eve of St. Agnes” is a  narrative poem , a poem that tells a story. It is also an example of the  medieval revival , the renewed interest in the Middle Ages evident in some Romantic literature. During the 19th century, many writers idealized the Middle Ages; it seemed romantic and less complicated than the modern world. However, they often had a fairy tale view of medieval times, thinking only of knights in shining armor rescuing fair damsels in distress rather than recognizing the harsh, violent time period that it really was.

This story is set in the Middle Ages and is a type of Romeo and Juliet story of two feuding families and the children who love each other in spite of their families’ enmity. Ambiguity at the end of the story leaves readers to decide whether Madeline and Porphyro “live happily ever after” or whether they freeze in the winter night.

Central to the story is a medieval superstition concerning St. Agnes Eve. This type of superstition—a ritual that allows young girls to find out who their future husband will be—is common in many cultures. In America’s past there have been superstitions and folklore involving sleeping with a piece of wedding cake under your pillow, or peeling an apple and throwing the peel over your shoulder. In the Middle Ages, superstition specified a ritual which, if followed on St. Agnes Eve, would allow a girl to dream of her future husband. Note the specifics of the ritual in Stanza 6. Porphyro, aided by Madeline’s nurse, decides to take advantage of his knowledge that his beloved Madeline will be expecting to see a vision of her true love. Note in Stanza 35, however, how Madeline reacts to the real Porphyro compared with her dream.

“The Eve of St. Agnes” presents the reader with two contrasting worlds, separated by symbolic doors. The poem begins with a description of a harsh, cold landscape in which even nature suffers, focusing on the beadsman, near freezing to death, who prays for the family. A door opens, and the reader is ushered into a warm, colorful world inside the house where the main action takes place. Then in Stanza 41, a door opens again and the lovers leave the castle, taking with them any hint of love and warmth. The poem ends in images of death and cold.

“To Autumn”

Video clip 10.

Keats’s “To Autumn”

View a video mini-lecture on “To Autumn.”

SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

  Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

  With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,

  And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

    To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

  And still more, later flowers for the bees,

  Until they think warm days will never cease,

    For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

  Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

  Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,

  Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

    Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

  Steady thy laden head across a brook;

  Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,

    Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

  Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

  And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

  Among the river sallows, borne aloft

    Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

  Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

  The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

    And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

“Ode to a Nightingale”

While Keats lived in Brown’s Hampstead house, a plum tree grew next to the front door. One evening, Keats was sitting under the tree when he heard a nightingale singing from the tree.

The poem begins by focusing on the speaker, sick at heart and in spirit, envious of the bird’s happiness. The speaker searches for a way to escape the pain of living. In Stanza 2 he considers wine as a means of escape but rejects that possibility.

In Stanza 3, the speaker recognizes that wine will not make him forget the “weariness, the fever, and the fret” of living, hardships that the nightingale has never known. Even in poetry, the speaker does not find an escape from the cares of living. So burdened by the pain of life, the speaker confesses that he has at times been “half in love with easeful death.” He adds that this moment, enraptured by the beauty of the bird’s song, seems an even more tempting time to die. He realizes, however, that in death he would miss the small consolation of this beauty.

In Stanza 7, the speaker exclaims, “Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!” He recognizes that since ancient times people have been enchanted by this same song.

Finally, he imagines the bird flying across the meadow and river, leaving the speaker wondering if he had imagined or dreamed the entire experience.

Key Takeaways

• More interested in poetic form than many Romantic writers, Keats wrote sonnets.
• Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes” is an example of the medieval revival.
• Keats uses nature to express his themes, often themes concerning death.
• What characteristics of Romanticism are evident in Keats’s poetry?
• How does Romantic mysticism appear in the works of Keats?
• How does Keats’s use of nature compare with that of other Romantic writers?

“When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be”

• What does Keats mean when he writes, “When I have fears that I may cease to be”?
• The poet expresses a different fear in each quatrain. What are his three fears?
• His only consolation from his fears is expressed in the final couplet. What is it?
• Why does this poem seem especially sad when we know Keats’s biography?
• Keats is known for the richness of the descriptive imagery in his poetry. Compile a chronological list of the scenes in the poem, and list some of the description included in each scene. (For example, the first scene in the poem is outdoors, with the owl, the rabbit, and the frozen grass.)
• “The Eve of St. Agnes” is a poem of contrasts. List and explain contrasting ideas you find in the poem (for example, youth and old age, warmth and cold).
• Write a character sketch of Madeline, including a physical description, character traits, and actions and motives in the poem.
• Write a character sketch of Porphyro, including a physical description, character traits, and actions and motives in the poem.
• What do you think happened to the lovers?
• “ Afterlife .”  Presenting John Keats . Curated by Libby Chenault and Katherine Carlson, Rare Book Collection, Wilson Library. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
• John Keats 1795–1821 .  Keats-Shelley House . includes images of Romantic writers, manuscripts, first editions.
• John Keats (1795–1821) . Online Gallery: John Keats. British Library. includes images of Keats and of manuscripts.
• “ The Life and Legacy of John Keats .”  Presenting John Keats . Curated by Libby Chenault and Katherine Carlson, Rare Book Collection, Wilson Library. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
• “ Work and Reappraisal .”  Presenting John Keats . Curated by Libby Chenault and Katherine Carlson, Rare Book Collection, Wilson Library. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
• “ John Keats .” Dr. Carol Lowe, McLennan Community College.
• Keats-Shelley House . virtual tour of the house in Rome where Keats was living when he died, now the location of the Keats-Shelley Museum, including information about Keats’s time in Rome
• “ Keats and Brawne: The Romance and Love Letters .” Woman’s Hour. BBC 4.
• “ Keats’s ‘To Autumn .’” Dr. Carol Lowe, McLennan Community College.
• “ Bright Star” Panel Discussion . Stuart Curran, Christopher Ricks, Timothy Corrigan and Susan Wolfson At the New York Public Library Performing Arts Library, 13 September 2009.  Romantic Circles . General Editors: Neil Fraistat and Steven E. Jones Technical Editor: Laura Mandell. University of Maryland.
• “ Chris Dombrowski Reads ‘To Autumn’ by John Keats .”  Poets on Poets . Ed. Tilar Mazzeo.  Romantic Circles . General Editors: Neil Fraistat and Steven E. Jones. Technical Editor: Laura Mandell. University of Maryland. text and audio.
• “ The Eve of St. Agnes .”  LibriVox .
• “ Keats, Shelley, and the ‘Bright Star .’” Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi Lecture at the University of Loyola Chicago, 19 October 2006.  Romantic Circles . General Editors: Neil Fraistat and Steven E. Jones Technical Editor: Laura Mandell. University of Maryland.
• “ Ode to a Nightingale .”  Keats-Shelley House .
• “ On Seeing the Elgin Marbles .”  LibriVox .
• “ The Posthumous Life .”  Keats-Shelley House . audio drama of Keats’s last days in Rome.
• “ To Autumn .”  Keats-Shelley House .
• “ Tom Thompson Reads ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ by John Keats .”  Poets on Poets . Ed. Tilar Mazzeo.  Romantic Circles . General Editors: Neil Fraistat and Steven E. Jones. Technical Editor: Laura Mandell. University of Maryland. audio and text of the poem and commentary.
• “ Wesley McNair Reads ‘When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be’  by John Keats.”  Poets on Poets . Ed. Tilar Mazzeo.  Romantic Circles . General Editors: Neil Fraistat and Steven E. Jones. Technical Editor: Laura Mandell. University of Maryland. audio of the poem and commentary. Additional recordings of this sonnet by Carey Salerno and Ravi Shankar. text and audio.

Concordance

• “ An Electronic Concordance to Keats’s Poetry .” Electronic Ed. Noah Comet. Ed. Jack Stillinger.  Romantic Circles . General Editors: Neil Fraistat and Steven E. Jones Technical Editor: Laura Mandell. University of Maryland.
• John Keats The Odes of 1819 Web Concordance .  The Web Concordances .
• “ The Eve of St. Agnes : a Poem / by John Keats; With a Preface Written for It by Edmund Gosse. Edition limited to 800 copies made upon L.L. Brown’s H.M. paper…printed…from plates made from drawings for each page, designed & lettered by Ralph Fletcher Seymour.  Hathi Trust Digital Library .

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John Keats was an English poet who belonged to the period of Romanticism in English literature- dedicated himself to the perfection of poetry. His poetry is marked by the intense use of imagery of classical legend articulated by philosophy. John Keats was born on 31 st October 1795. Along with Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, he was one of the prominent figures of the Romantic poets of the second generation. However, his works were published four years before his death. He died of tuberculosis on 23 rd February 1821 at the age of 25.

Though the critics of his time did not receive his work very well, his reputation as the greatest Romantic grew after his death. At the end of the 19 th century, he was regarded as one of the most beloved English poets, of all poets. He influenced a significant number of poets and writers significantly. For instance, Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentine short-story writer, poet, essayist, and translator, commented that the most significant literary experience he had in his life was his first encounter with the work of Keats.  

A Short Biography of John Keats

John Keats was born in Morefield. He was the son of a hostler and stable keeper, thus born in the stable of the swan and Hoop Inn, London. His father, Thomas Keats, died when he was just eight years old. Adding to the misfortune of John Keats, his mother, Frances Jennings Keats, was also diagnosed with tuberculosis when he was fourteen years old. His life and metal health was greatly influenced by these tragic events and brought him closer to his siblings. He has two brothers Tom and George, and one sister, Fanny.

Keats tried to find ease and escape in art and literature when his parents died. He was an insatiable reader at the Enfield Academy.  Keats was closely associated with the headmaster, John Clark, of the academy as he proved to be a fatherly figure to Keats. Clark encouraged him to develop his interest in the young orphan in literature and art.

In 1810, John Keats withdrew from the Enfield Academy and started pursuing the career of a surgeon. In 1816, he completed his medical education and was appointed as the certified apothecary in the hospital in London. Despite pursuing the medical career, Keats’ devotion to literature and art never ended. In the meantime, through a close friend Cowden Clarke, he became familiar with the editor Leigh Hunt of The Examiner. In 1817, he shifted back to London. However, his friendship with Hunt still continued.

The year 1819 is marked with the ups and downs for John Keats. He received very harsh criticism from the critics on his long poem “Endymion,” which discouraged him a lot. When he moved to Hampstead, he met with the Brawne family. Fanny Brawne, the daughter of the Browne family, was a beautiful girl. Though she was five years younger than Keats, he fell in deep love with her. Soon after, Keats and Fanny Brawne got engaged. It was during this period that Keats wrote his famous poem “Ode to a Nightingale” and Ode to Grecian Urn.”

In 1820, Keats was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He was very well nursed by Fanny Brawne. Though he was severely ill, he tried his best to finish the last poem, and ultimately it received the admiration of a lot of people. However, he gave up writing poetry due to his ailing condition and shifted to Italy for treatment with friend Joseph Severn. He could not survive the disease and died. He was buried in Rome.

John Keats’ Writing style

The writing style of John Keats is overwhelmed by poetic devices such as personification, alliteration, metaphors, assonance, and consonance. These devices are put together, which creates the music and rhythm in the poems. For example, his poem “Ode to the Nightingale” is full of literary devices. Similarly, his poetry is also characterized by sensual imagery . His poems “Lamia,” “Hyperion,” “Ode to the Nightingale,” and “Endymion” are the best examples of sensual imagery.

Moreover, the diction used by Keats is also connotative.  For example, in the poem, “Ode to the Grecian Urn,” Keats implied formal diction: 

“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter: therefore, ye soft pipes, play on …”

The uses of formal diction “ye” in the above lines.

 The odes written by Keats are a unique achievement in poetry. Keats’s odes are usually a lyrical reflection on something that stimulates the poet to encounter his own inner desires, to think about his own longings and their relationship with the harsh reality of the outer world. 

Being the last romantic poet, he shows the typical aspects of Romanticism in his poetry. Though Keats wrote for only three years, the poems he wrote in these three years become the hallmark of the literary canon and make him one of the greatest and most celebrated poets in English Literature. Though the themes of his poems are not concerned with nature, he implied the poetic devices to make his poetry gentle and romantic. Misery, death, love, and nature are the main aspects of Romantic poetry, and the readers also find these aspects in the poetry of Keats’ as well.

Similarly, in Romanticism, we also find the appreciation of past writers, mythology, and Latin. We observe that Keats’s poetry also observes these rules.

Though Keats’ style of writing poetry is unique, his manner of poetry is immensely suggestive of Edmund Spenser. Keats and other traditional Romantics would likely focus on the remote past, ancient myth, and fairy tales to escape from the harsh realities of life and the unwelcoming modern 19 th century. The material of Keats’ poem “Endymion” is found in remote antiquity instead of the Middle Ages. In essence, he used the manner of Middle Ages poetry in his poems “Eve of St. Agnes” and “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” 

  Keats writes his poetry in rhymed iambic pentameter; however, it is not exactly like the simple heroic couplet used by the poet of the previous century. We seldom find end-stops at the end of the poetry. He uses enjambment normally as his verses flow into one another, particularly in a narrative poem. For example, in the poem “Ode to the Nightingale” has the poetic device enjambment as follows: 

 “My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,

Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains.”

 To present the individual characters in the poem, Keats never coupled the narrative and the dramatic power. He would display the characters with expressive moods as he had mastered the lyrical powers. The moods were often romantic, pensive, lethargic, sadness, or ecstatic delight. These moods can greatly be observed in his odes.

The following are the characteristics of Keats’ poetry.

Quest for Beauty

Like other Romantic poets, Keats also focused on understanding and exploring the beauty of nature in his poems. According to Keats, there is beauty in every object of the universe, and as a poet, it is his job to look for it and incarcerate it in his poetry. According to Keats, a person becomes aware of the truth when he identifies and understands the concept of beauty. In his poem “Ode to Grecian Urn,” he writes in the final lines that

 “Beauty is truth, truth beauty — that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

  Emphasis on Ordinary Things

Keats, unlike the Romantic poets, emphasizes on the ordinary and common things in his poetry, particularly in efforts to understand beauty. Though famous Romantic poet, P.B. Shelley wrote about imperceptible things in his poetry, Keats emphasizes the identifiable and close object such as the dew of the season in autumn. Once Keats wrote, in his letter that “If a sparrow comes before my window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel.” This proposes that Keats always look for beauty in the ordinary things like sunset, sunrise, mountain, and valleys, etc. 

Exclusion of Self

While exploring and identifying the beauty of ordinary things in his poetry, Keats disposed of his personality that would dictate his exploration. In doing so, he aligned himself to the father of English Drama, William Shakespeare. Keats found Shakespeare to be able to write about ordinary things as he refrained from expressing fondness to anything.

The six odes that Keats wrote to the physical objects is one of the most famous sets of Keats poetry. These odes are to the urn, autumn, a nightingale, indolence, psyche, and melancholy. These odes are lyrical and are devoted to praising something, thus fall in the Literary and poetic tradition of English odes. The odes are the representatives of the obsession of Keats with exploration and understating the notion of beauty in ordinary things. These odes are the extended imageries, blended with illusory tales about the thing on which they are focusing on. Keats divulges each object and the notion of beauty through the interchange of narration and description.

Works Of John Keats

English History

John Keats Chronology & Timeline of his life & work

1795 31 October, John Keats is born, the first child of Thomas and Frances Keats. His birthplace is unknown.

18 December, John is baptized at St Botolph’s, Bishopsgate

1797 28 February, George Keats born

1799 18 November, Tom Keats born

1801 28 April, Edward Keats born (dies in 1802)

1802 December, the Keats family moves to the Swan and Hoop inn and stables, 24 Moorfields Pavement Row on London Wall. This business belongs to Keats’s grandfather; he retires in 1802 and asks Thomas and Frances Keats to take over the business.

1803 3 June, Frances Mary (Fanny) Keats born

John enters John Clarke’s School at Enfield, which he attends until 1811. He becomes life-long friends with the headmaster’s son, Charles Cowden Clark, who is eight years older. George enters with him; Tom arrives later.

1804 15 April, John’s father has a riding accident on his way home from visiting John and George at Enfield; he dies the following day. John’s mother disappears briefly after the death.

27 June, John’s mother marries William Rawlings. John and his brothers now spend school holidays at their grandparents’ home in Ponders End near Enfield.

1805 8 March, John’s grandfather dies. A lawsuit begins over his will. Months later, John’s mother disappears again. (This lawsuit, and its attendant stress upon the family, led to Keats’s chronic anxiety over money; he was both embarrassed and intimidated by most financial matters.)

John’s 69 year old grandmother moves to Church Street in Edmonton, taking her grandchildren with her.

1806-9 John continues his education at Enfield. He becomes closer friends with Clarke. He is prone to fits of temper; a schoolmate remembers him as ‘ardent and imaginative’.

In early 1809, after a 3 and a half year absence, John’s mother visits the house in Edmonton, asking whether she can live with her mother and children. John’s grandmother agrees.

John’s mother is ill with rheumatism and tuberculosis. He nurses her, as BR Haydon described in his diary: ‘Before his mother died, during her last illness, his devoted attachment interested all. He sat up whole nights in a great chair, would suffer nobody to give her medicine but himself, and even cooked her food; he did all, & read novels in her intervals of ease.’ When he returns to Enfield, he is far more committed to his studies and begins to read voraciously.

1810 The second week of March, John’s mother dies of tuberculosis. She is buried on 20 March. John receives the news at Enfield and is overcome with grief.

July, Richard Abbey and John Sandell are appointed guardians of the Keats children.

The mid-summer term is John’s last at Enfield; he is taken from school and apprenticed to the apothecary Dr Hammond of Edmonton. Clarke describes the next few years of training as ‘the most placid time in [Keats’s] painful life.’ He visits Clarke several times a month and continues his literary studies.

George also leaves Enfield and becomes an apprentice in Abbey’s business. Tom remains at Enfield.

1813 Clarke loans John a copy of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. John ‘went through it as a young horse would through a spring meadow – ramping! Like a true poet, too – a poet “born, not manufactured”, a poet in grain, he especially singled out epithets, for that felicity and power in which Spenser is so eminent. He hoisted himself up, and looked burly and dominant, as he said, “what an image that is – sea-shouldering whales!”‘ John later comes to read Shakespeare .

Clarke, meanwhile, attempts to establish himself as a poet. He discusses the work of Leigh Hunt with John but does not introduce the two men.

1814 Early in the year, John writes his first poems, ‘Imitation of Spenser’ and ‘On Peace’. In August, he writes ‘Fill for me a brimming bowl’.

Mid-December, John’s grandmother dies; she is buried on 19 December.

George continues to work in Abbey’s business; he is joined by Tom. After a brief stay at a girls’ school, Fanny goes to live with the Abbeys.

John continues to write poetry. As of December, he has nine months left in his apprenticeship.

1815 Spring and summer, John continues to write poetry. He spends time with Clarke at Enfield and with George and Tom in London.

July 1815, the Apothecary Act is passed. Instead of Keats being able to set up his own practice upon the completion of his apprenticeship, he now must train at a hospital.

1 October, John registers at Guy’s Hospital. He plans to study there for a year and then apply for membership in the Royal College of Surgeons. His classes include a variety of subjects – anatomy, chemistry, dissection, physiology, botany, as well as various duties around the hospital. Contrary to later rumors, Keats does well enough to earn a ‘dressership’ at Guy’s for the new year. (Only 12 dressers were chosen from 700 students.)

He enjoys his life at Guy’s and socializes with fellow students. He goes to cockfights, bear-baitings and boxing matches; he plays billiards; etc

Around this time, John first meets Joseph Severn, the young painter who will later accompany him to Rome. They are introduced either by George Keats or a mutual friend from Enfield. He also meets William Haslam, who becomes one of his closest friends.

1816 3 March, John begins work as a dresser. He is assigned to a surgeon whose operations were ‘very badly performed and accompanied by much bungling if not worse.’ Keats is required to dress wounds, change bandages and hold patients down during operations. He handles emergencies during his night duties and accompanies the surgeon on rounds. He sometimes performs his own operations.

5 May, John publishes his first poem, ‘O Solitude!’ in Leigh Hunt’s The Examiner. He had sent three poems in anonymously. The publication makes him consider a change in career. He decides to do the minimum work necessary for his medical career and continue writing. His friends fear he will fail his upcoming exams.

25 July in Blackfriars, John sits for the four exams necessary to become a Licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries. The exams cover the following s: a translation of the pharmacopoeia and physicians’ prescriptions; the theory and practice of medicine; pharmaceutical chemistry; and materia medica. Keats passes. He was 20 years old and had become an apothecary ‘in the shortest time possible and at the earliest possible age.’ Neither of his roommates pass the exams.

Summer, John goes on vacation to Margate with his brother, Tom, who is already in poor health. John proposes that he and Tom find a home to rent together in London. George is living with a business partner. On this vacation, John begins to write the lengthy letters to family and friends which helped to shape his ideas and beliefs. They are considered the most beautiful letters of any poet. Clarke moves to London and shows Leigh Hunt some of John’s poetry.

Late September, John returns to his new lodgings at 8 Dean Street but Tom moves in with George instead. He plans to apply for membership in the Royal College of Surgery the following year. He begins a new set of classes on surgery at Guy’s.

Mid-October, Clarke and John read a copy of George Chapman’s translation of Homer . John walks home the next morning, composing a sonnet along the way. He writes it down at Dean Street; it is called ‘On First looking into Chapman’s Homer’ and is considered his first great work. John has it sent immediately to Clarke’s home and it reaches his breakfast-table at 10 o’clock the same morning.

Autumn, John begins to meet the group of friends he will keep for the rest of his life. Among them are Leigh Hunt, James Rice, John Hamilton Reynolds, and the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon.

31 October, John turns 21 years old. He is now in full possession of his inheritance. There are two problems: first, his inheritance from his grandmother has been mostly spent on his medical training and second, his inheritance from his grandfather (valued at £800 plus cash interest) is in Chancery and his guardian Abbey does not know about it. John is, as always, reluctant and embarrassed about money matters; he never finds out the exact amount. He knows he cannot sustain a career in poetry unless it is commercially successful.

3 November, John visits Haydon’s studio and writes a sonnet praising Haydon, Hunt and the poet Wordsworth. Haydon send the sonnet to Wordsworth. John meets the influential critic William Hazlitt through Haydon.

Mid-November, John moves in with George and Tom at 76 Cheapside.

Late 1816 through 1817, Haydon and Hunt both consider John their protégé and there is some jealousy over his friendship with each. Hunt becomes friends with Percy Shelley and begins to patronize and neglect John a bit. John meets Shelley; they go for walks along Hampstead Heath and Shelley tries to persuade John not to publish his existing works.

November, John begins two longer poems, ‘I stood tip-toe upon a little hill’ and ‘Sleep and Poetry’.

1 December, Hunt publishes an essay in The Examiner titled ‘Three Young Poets’, about Shelley, Keats and Reynolds. They represent a ‘new school of poetry’. ‘On First looking into Chapman’s Homer’ appears in this issue. John decides to abandon his medical career.

14 December, Haydon makes a lifemask of John’s face (view at Keats: Images or to the right) and plans to include him in his next painting, ‘Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem’. Around the same time, Joseph Severn makes the earliest known sketch of Keats (view at Keats: Images.)

Late December, John meets with his guardian, Richard Abbey, to tell him he is leaving medicine. Abbey argues that John should set up an apothecary practice in Edmonton while continuing his surgical studies. Abbey recalled the meeting later: ‘Not intend to be a Surgeon! Why what do you mean to be? I mean to rely on my Abilities as a Poet – John, you are either mad or a Fool, to talk in so absurd a Manner. My mind is made up said the youngster very quietly. I know that I possess Abilities greater than most Men, and therefore I am determined to gain my Living by exercising them. – ‘

1817 January and February, John continues to meet with his friends and work on his poetry; with Hunt’s help, he is seeking a publisher for his first volume of poetry. Two more of his sonnets are published in The Examiner.

27 February, John writes ‘This pleasant tale is like a little copse’. Read about its composition and view the original manuscript at Keats: Manuscripts.

1 or 2 March, Haydon takes John to view the Elgin Marbles. John writes the two Elgin Marbles sonnets.

3 March, John’s first volume, Poems, is published by C and J Ollier. His Elgin Marbles sonnets are published in The Examiner.

March, John and his brothers move to No. 1 Well Walk, next to Hampstead Heath. John meets the publisher John Taylor. They become friends and Taylor and his partner James Hessey plans to publish all of John’s future work.

14 March to late April, John travels alone to the Isle of Wight, lodging at Carisbrooke. He writes the sonnet ‘On the Sea’ and begins the great long poem, ‘Endymion’.

24 or 25 April, John moves to Margate where Tom joins him. He is loaned £20 by his new publisher and continues to work on ‘Endymion’.

May, John meets Benjamin Bailey and Charles Brown for the first time

June, John is back at Well Walk with his brothers and still working on ‘Endymion’. By the end of August, he has completed Books I and II.

3 September, John goes to stay with Benjamin Bailey at Oxford. They visit Stratford-upon-Avon. John writes Book III of ‘Endymion’.

5 October, John returns to Well Walk. He falls ill briefly and takes mercury.

28 November, John finishes ‘Endymion’.

12 December (date not certain), Haydon takes John to meet William Wordsworth . John sees the older poet several times afterwards.

15 and 18 December, John watches Edmund Kean perform in Drury Lane in two plays, Riches and Richard III .

21 December, John publishes his first theatrical review, of Kean’s performances, in The Champion.

28 December, John attends Haydon’s ‘Immortal Dinner’. Charles Lamb and Wordsworth are among the other guests.

1818 January-February, revises and copies Endymion and attends Hazlitt’s lectures March-April, John stays at Teignmouth, nursing his ill brother Tom Writes Isabella, or the Pot of Basil Endymion published by Taylor & Hessey 22-30 June, George Keats leaves for America John tours the Lake District with Charles Brown July – 8 August, walking tour of Scotland with Brown August – December, nurses Tom at Hampstead and meets Fanny Brawne for the first time Attacks on Poems and Endymion appear in ‘Blackwood’s’ and ‘Quarterly’ Begins Hyperion 1 December, Tom dies Keats moves to Wentworth Place

1819 January, writes The Eve of St Agnes Stays in Sussex and Hampshire 13-17 February, writes The Eve of St Mark March-April, John experiences a bout of depression and gives up writing Hyperion The Brawnes move into part of Wentworth Place 21 April-May, writes La Belle Dame Sans Merci Writes his famous Odes John becomes unofficially engaged to Fanny Brawne July-August, John experiences the first signs of tuberculosis At Shanklin, Isle of Wight, writing Lamia Part I and Otho the Great August-October, moves to Winchester, writes Lamia Part II Writes To Autumn Begins and abandons The Fall of Hyperion October-December, John returns to Hampstead Becomes officially engaged to Fanny Brawne John suffers another bout of depression; he is ill and unhappy

1820 January, George Keats returns to England to raise money John comes to a financial settlement with the executor of his grandmother’s estate; the settlement leaves him penniless (he gives most of his money to George) 3 February, John has his first lung haemorrhage and is confined to his house May, Charles Brown rents out the house and John moves to Kentish Town, near Leigh Hunt 22 June, John has a severe second haemorrhage and moves to Leigh Hunt’s home July, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes and other poems is published and well-reviewed August, John leaves the Hunt home and is nursed by Fanny Brawne at Wentworth Place 17 September, John sails for Italy with Joseph Severn November, John reaches Rome 30 November, John writes his last known letter

1821 23 February, John dies at 26 Piazza di Spagna, Rome 26 February, John is buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome

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John Keats was born on the 31 st October in 1795 in London , England, to Thomas Keats, an innkeeper, and Frances Keats. Unfortunately, his father breathed his last in 1803 when he was just eight years old, and his mother died of tuberculosis in 1810. He spent his early years with his widowed grandmother at Edmonton, Middlesex.

John Keat’s father worked as a stable keeper and could not afford his education. Keats got his primary education from a local dame school. Later, in 1803, he enrolled himself at the John Clarke’s school in Enfield. There he was exposed to classics and history: his friend also introduced him to renaissance literature and writers such as Tasso, Spenser, and Chapman’s translations. Soon the demise of his father changed his life. Abandoning studies, he started working with Thomas Hammond, a well-known surgeon of his time. To supplement his knowledge, he also started studying medicine at London Hospital. Although he was doing well in medicine, destiny had planned a different direction for him. He devoted himself more and more toward arts and literature. This change can be witnessed in the poem “An Imitation to Spencer”. It was published in 1814. Later, in 1816 his sonnet “O Solitude” appeared in The Examiner. This immediate success triggered him to produce masterpieces such as odes and sonnets. Most of his works were published during April and May of 1819.

Love and Tragedy

After the death of his brother, he moved to the Hampstead area of London with Charles Brown in 1819. There he found the love of his life, Fanny Brawne. By the end of 1819, they got formally engaged: his love gave him the strength to compose some of his most famous poems like “ Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “ Ode to a Nightingale .” The young poet also wrote remarkable epistles and letters. Then in 1820, all his hopes and plans began to fade away when he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He had to bid farewell to his love and move to Italy to avoid severe English weather. It is in the same year, he quit writing poetry. Though he loved Fanny, he never got married due to his illness.

When he separated from Fanny, he lost interest in life, and everything came to an end. He died on 23 February 1821, in Rome at the age of twenty-five. He was buried at the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. Although his life was short, he managed to produce outstanding literary pieces.

• He worked as an Apothecary Surgeon for five years.
• It was Edmund Spencer’s Faerie Queene that turned him to the world of literature, and he wrote many masterpieces.
• When he became a published poet, he burnt his earlier works, considering them awful.
• During his short life of 25 years, Keats published fifty-four poems and three  novels  as well as a few magazines using a wide range of poetic forms, including odes and sonnets.

Writing Career

  John Keats led a traumatic life. However, obstacles like the death of his parents and his illness did not slow down his writing. He also became a licensed apothecary in 1816, though he did not find medicine liking to his taste. Rather, he found his liking to literature while working at the hospital. He became a friend of the editor of The Examiner, Leigh Hunt, who triggered his literary career, introducing him to literary figures such as Wordsworth and P. B. Shelly. He continued writing, which finally led him to see his first poem appear in The Examiner in 1816, followed by his first book “Poems” in 1817. From then onward, he devoted himself to poetry and produced masterpieces like “Endymion” and “Hyperion.” Later, in 1819, he produced more excellent works such as, “ I stood tip-toe” ,  “ Sleep and Poetry” , “ Keen Fitful Gusts”, “ Ode on a Grecian Urn ”, “Ode to Nightingale” and “ La Belle Dame Sans Merci .” Besides these marvelous poems and sonnets, he wrote letters to his friends and family explaining his ideas about life, love, and poetry, which were published in 1848 and 1878 and won instant public appreciation.

After establishing his career, first as a surgeon and then as a poet, Keats made a name in the world of literature. He gained immense popularity on account of unique ideas he expressed in his literary pieces. The early demise of his parents made him understand that the human condition is a blend of beauty as well as pain. That is why he blended these ideas into his poetry, such as; “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “Endymion.”  The recurring thematic strands in most of the poems include love, nature, beauty, and mankind. He often used literary devices like metaphors , sensual imagery , symbolism , and similes as his style .

John Keats’s Works

• Best Poems : Some of the best poems he has written include “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, “Ode to Nightingale”, “Endymion”, “Hyperion,” and “When I Have Fears.”
• Letters : Although he spent most of his life writing poetry, his letters also won fame for him. His famous letters include; “ To Charles Cowden Clarke “,  ” To Benjamin Robert Haydon “, “ To Charles Cowden Clarke ” and “To George and Thomas Keats.”

John Keats’s Impact on Future Literature

John Keats will always be a great poet and a writer who started his writing career at a young age. He became popular quite early in his short life. His unique writing style and literary qualities of his masterpieces brought great changes in the world of literature. He had a significant influence on a diverse range of writers and poets. Jorge Louis Borges states that his literary encounter with John Keats ’ poetry remained the most significant event of his life.  In fact, Keats successfully brought the concept of beauty into the light and its permanent existence in the human soul. His ideas expressed in his poems and letters influence other writers to imitate his style. They considered him a role model for their poetry.

John Keats’s Famous Quotes

• “ A thing of beauty is a joy forever : Its loveliness increases; It will never pass into nothingness.” (Endymion)
• “Love in a hut, with water and a crust, Is- -Love, forgive us!–cinders, ashes, dust; Love in a palace is perhaps at last More grievous torment than a hermit’s fast.” (Lamia)
• Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” –that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. (Ode on a Grecian Urn)
• “Away! Away! I will fly to thee, Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, But on the viewless wings of Poesy.” (Ode to a Nightingale)

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• Literary Writing Style of John Steinbeck
• Ode to a Nightingale
• When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be
• Ode on a Grecian Urn
• Bright Star, Would I Were Stedfast as Thou Art
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• On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
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John Keats Biography and Work

Table of Contents

John Keats (1795-1821) was an English Romantic poet whose work continues to be celebrated for its beauty, emotion, and lyrical style. Born in London, Keats was the son of a stable keeper and received a limited education before training as a surgeon. However, he ultimately abandoned his medical career to pursue poetry full-time.

Early Work and Career

John Keats Biography and Work:- Keats’s first published work was a collection of poems entitled “Poems” (1817), which he wrote alongside his friends Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Wordsworth. Although the collection was not initially well-received, it did contain several poems that have since become beloved classics, including “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” “Sleep and Poetry,” and “The Eve of St. Agnes.”

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Keats’s next collection, “Endymion” (1818), was met with mixed reviews and criticism, which deeply affected the young poet. Despite the negative response, Keats continued to write and publish poetry, and his next collection, “Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems” (1820), was better received. The collection includes several of Keats’s most famous works, including “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and “To Autumn.”

Illness and Death

John Keats Biography and Work:- Sadly, Keats’s career was cut short by illness. He was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1820, and the disease would ultimately claim his life just a few years later. Despite his failing health, Keats continued to write, and his final poems, including “The Fall of Hyperion” and “To Autumn,” are considered some of his most masterful and poignant works.

Keats died in Rome in February of 1821 at the age of 25, and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery there. His reputation as one of the greatest poets of the Romantic era has only grown since his death, and his work continues to inspire and captivate readers to this day.

John Keats Biography and Work:- John Keats’s legacy continues to be felt today, more than two centuries after his birth. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest poets in the English language, and his works are studied and celebrated by scholars, students, and poetry lovers around the world.

Keats’s poetry continues to inspire and influence generations of writers, artists, and musicians. His use of vivid imagery, his exploration of the themes of love, mortality, and the power of the imagination, and his lyrical and emotional style have left an indelible mark on the literary world.

John Keats Biography and Work:- Keats’s work has also had a profound impact on the wider culture. His ideas about the importance of the individual, the power of the imagination, and the connection between art and the spiritual world have resonated with readers and thinkers across the centuries.

In addition, Keats’s life and work have been the subject of countless books, films, and other works of art. His tragic death at the young age of 25 has only added to his mythic status, and his story continues to capture the imaginations of people around the world.

Overall, John Keats’s legacy is one of profound beauty, emotional depth, and lasting relevance to the human experience. His works remain a testament to the power of art to inspire, transform, and transcend the limitations of the individual self.

Themes and Style

John Keats Biography and Work:- Keats’s poetry is characterized by its emphasis on beauty, love, and the power of the imagination. He often used vivid and sensuous descriptions of nature, which he saw as a source of spiritual and artistic inspiration. Keats was interested in exploring the idea of beauty as a form of truth and transcendence, and many of his poems celebrate the transformative power of art and the imagination.

One of the central themes in Keats’s work is the idea of mortality and the transience of life. He was acutely aware of the brevity of human existence, and many of his poems explore the idea of death as a natural and inevitable part of the cycle of life. However, Keats also believed in the possibility of transcendence, and many of his poems suggest that the beauty and power of art can provide a kind of immortality.

Another key theme in Keats’s work is the idea of love as a transformative force. He was deeply interested in the power of love to inspire and elevate the human spirit, and many of his poems explore the idea of love as a kind of spiritual and emotional journey. Keats believed that love could help to transcend the limitations of the individual self, and many of his poems celebrate the transformative power of love as a form of communion with the divine.

John Keats Biography and Work:- Stylistically, Keats’s poetry is characterized by its lyricism, emotional intensity, and vivid imagery. He used rich and sensuous language to create a kind of musicality in his poetry, and many of his poems are marked by their emotional depth and intense emotional resonance. Keats also made use of classical and mythological imagery, which he saw as a way to connect his work to the timeless traditions of Western literature and culture.

Overall, Keats’s themes and style reflect his deep interest in the transformative power of art and the imagination, as well as his belief in the possibility of transcendence and spiritual elevation. His work continues to be celebrated for its beauty, emotional depth, and lasting relevance to the human experience.

Famous English Romantic poet John Keats made his influence on literature by writing poetry that was delicate, lyrical, and intensely emotional. His works are still studied and admired for their beauty, the depth to which they probe issues like love, beauty, mortality, and the power of the imagination, and the profundity to which they illuminate the human condition. Keats’ life was tragically cut short, but his poetry, which has influenced many readers and authors all across the world, continues to carry on his legacy.

Q. What was John Keats famous for?

Ans. John Keats was famous for his poetry, which is characterized by its lyrical and emotional intensity, its emphasis on beauty and the power of the imagination, and its exploration of themes such as love, mortality, and the transcendent power of art.

Q. When was John Keats born and when did he die?

Ans. John Keats was born on October 31, 1795, in London, England. He died on February 23, 1821, at the age of 25, in Rome, Italy.

Q. What is John Keats’s most famous poem?

Ans. John Keats’s most famous poem is probably “Ode to a Nightingale,” which is considered one of the greatest poems in the English language. Other notable works include “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “To Autumn,” and “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.”

Q. What is the significance of John Keats’s “negative capability”?

Ans. “Negative capability” is a term coined by John Keats to describe the ability to embrace uncertainty, mystery, and the unknown. It is a key aspect of Keats’s approach to poetry, which values the imagination and emotional intuition over reason and logic.

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