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John Keats (1795-1821)

LINKS

http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=67

This link connects you to the Academy of American Poets. Here you will find an exhibit on John Keats including a biography, online primary texts, criticism, bibliographic information, and additional links.

http://www.bl.uk/whatson/exhibitions/keats.html

This link connects you to the Keats exhibition at the British Library. Here you will find online manuscripts of letters and poems, criticism, a biography of the poet's life, and other resources.

BIOGRAPHY

Born in 1795, John Keats (1795-1821) was the eldest child of Thomas and Frances Jennings Keats; he had three brothers—George (1797-1841), Thomas (1799-1818), Edward (1801-1802))—and one sister, Frances Mary (1803—1889). Thomas Keats managed a livery stable at the Swan and Hoop Inn that was owned by his father-in-law John Jennings. Not insignificantly, John Keats's boyhood was marked by a series of traumas. When the poet was nine years old, his father was killed in a riding accident. Keats's mother then remarried two months later. Soon thereafter Keats and his siblings were taken in by their grandmother Alice Jennings. The next year John Jennings, the poet's grandfather, died leaving an estate which was subsequently mismanaged to the poet's disadvantage in later life. In 1805, Alice moved the children from Enfield to Edmonton. The following year, Frances, the poet's mother left her second husband and was reputed to be living with another man in Edmonton. She would eventually return to live with her mother and children for a short time before dying in 1810 of tuberculosis. As one of his mother's primary care givers during her illness, John Keats was profoundly affected by this loss, which would be magnified in the deaths by tuberculosis of his uncle in 1808 and brother Tom ten years later.

After receiving an early education from John Clarke, the independent-minded headmaster of the Enfield school, Keats began an apprenticeship to the Edmonton apothecary surgeon Thomas Hammond in 1811. In 1814, Keats's grandmother Alice Jennings died. The following year, Keats's pursued his medical training at Guy's Hospital. Passing his apothecaries' examination the next year, Keats also published his first poem, the sonnet "O Solitude" in Leigh Hunt's journal, the Examiner. At this time, Keats's commitment to poetry grew apace owing in part to his reading in Homer, the subject of his sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer." The title of this Italian sonnet refers to a 1616 folio edition of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey translated by George Chapman. Keats's friend Charles Cowden Clarke had been loaned the book and the two had sat up all night reading it together in October 1816. The next morning, Keats composed what is regarded as his finest work from his first volume Poems.

Soon Keats's circle of acquaintances grew to include Benjamin Haydon, John Hamilton Reynolds, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Keats abandoned medicine as a career in 1817. That same year, C. and J. Ollier published Keats's first volume of verse Poems as the poet combined work on his next volume Endymion with visits to the Isle of Wight, Margate, Hastings, and Oxford. By the end of 1817, Keats had also met Benjamin Bailey, Charles Wentworth Dilke, Charles Brown, and the poet William Wordsworth. Already, however, Keats's poetry begins to testify to certain world-weariness and growing sense of mortality that the young poet portrays in "On Seeing the Elgin Marbles." The so-called Elgin Marbles consist of fragmentary remains of sculptures that once adorned the Parthenon built in Athens from 447BC to 432 BC. The Parthenon housed a magnificent statue of the goddess Athena. The marbles stage battle scenes between Olympian gods and mythic giants, as well as among the Greeks, Amazons, Centaurs, and Trojans. Other scenes depict Panathenaic festivals. In addition to the Elgin Marbles of the British Museum, the Parthenon marbles are housed in Athens and the Louvre in Paris. Lord Elgin had brought fragments of the Parthenon marbles to London from Greece in 1807. The year before Keats wrote the sonnet they were the subject of political debate in the House of Commons on the question of whether England should purchase them from Elgin. At the time, Keats's liberal colleagues sided with the effort to buy them as a way of elevating British culture. Conservatives were reluctant to support a Neo-Classical revival that would undermine Christian values. Keats by celebrating Grecian art and literature was himself attacked in an 1818 issue of Blackwood's as the "Cockney Homer."

The sparse sales of Keats's first volume of poems led him to place his second book Endymion with Taylor and Hessey who published it in 1818. Keats's ties to the liberal-minded editor Leigh Hunt generated hostile reviews from the conservative ranks of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine and from the editors of Critical Quarterly. The myth that Keats was devastated by this harsh reception—that, as Lord Byron has it in Don Juan, the young Keats was "snuffed out by an article"—has been somewhat overstated. For his part, Keats allowed as how "my own domestic criticism has given me pain beyond what Blackwood or the Quarterly could possibly inflict." Certainly, however, 1818 was a very difficult year for Keats not just owing to the critical attacks he suffered for Endymion but, equally important, due to his brother Tom's declining health from tuberculosis.

Beginning in March of 1818, John replaced his brother George as Tom's caretaker in Teignmouth. George would go on to marry Georgiana Augusta Wylie that May and immigrate to America the next month. For Tom and John Keats, however, that early Devonshire spring was wet and dreary. Yet it was also a time when Keats read deeply in Milton and drafted, among other things, his poem Isabella as well as his famous letter to John Hamilton Reynolds on the "Chamber of Maiden-thought." Meanwhile, Tom's health further declined and the two brothers had a harrowing return trip from Devon to Hampstead. John went on to accompany George and Georgiana to Liverpool and then joined Charles Brown on a tour of the Lake District and Scotland. By the end of the summer Keats's own health was jarred by a severe cold and "sore throat" which, along with the news that Tom's condition had deteriorated, made him cut short his tour of Scotland. Returning to London in August, Keats found his brother Tom bed-ridden and emaciated from advanced tuberculosis. Once again, Keats took on the responsibility of nursing his brother as he had earlier with their mother. On the morning of December 1, Tom died of the disease. During the fall, the poet also met and eventually fell in love with Fanny Brawne.

Beginning in January of 1819, Keats enjoyed the most creative and productive period of his career as a poet. From January through February he composed "The Eve of St. Agnes," followed by "La Belle Dame sans Merci" that April, the same month that the Brawne family became his neighbors at Wentworth Place. During April and May, he composed the great odes—"Psyche," "Nightingale," "Grecian Urn," and "Melancholy." Leaving Wentworth, in part to distance himself from his passionate attachment to Fanny, Keats composed Lamia on the Isle of Wight and worked on The Fall of Hyperion from July through the end of the summer, composing "To Autumn" as well that September. This intense schedule of writing also included the poet's collaboration with Brown on a tragedy Otho the Great, several scenes for another tragedy, King Stephen, and a partially completed satire, The Jealousies (The Cap and Bells).

Keats's great creative period came to an end that Fall as the symptoms of tuberculosis began to manifest themselves, culminating with a severe hemorrhage in the lungs on February 3, 1820. That May, Keats moved to Kentish Town, close to Hampstead, then to the home of Leigh Hunt following yet another hemorrhage. Eventually, Keats returned to Wentworth place in August where he was attended by Fanny Brawne and her mother. Meanwhile, Keats's third book of poems Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and Other Poems was published in July by Taylor and Hessey. Twelve reviews came out in the two months following its release and, unlike the criticisms of Endymion, the majority were favorable. Yet this good news was tempered by Keats's diagnosis of consumption and his doctors' insistence that he spend the winter in Italy, which, of course, meant a separation from Fanny Brawne. By this time the two had an "understanding" of engagement but there was little hope, realistically, that Keats would return from his trip to Rome. Keats left England, bound for Italy, on September 18, 1820 accompanied by his friend, the artist, Joseph Severn. After taking up residence on the second floor of 26 Piazza di Spagna in Rome, Keats's condition worsened steadily and, attended by Severn until the very end, the poet died on February 23, 1821. Today, Keats lies buried in the Protestant cemetery in Rome, where his tombstone, as the poet intended, bears his famous epitaph: "Here lies 'One Whose Name was writ in Water.'"

SECONDARY SOURCES

Clark, Tom. Junkets on a Sad Planet : Scenes from the Life of John Keats. Black Sparrow Press, 1993.

de Almeida, Hermoine. Critical Essays on John Keats (Critical Essays on British Literature) New York: G K Hall, 1990.

Hirst, Wolf Z. John Keats. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1981.

June, Judy Little. Keats As a Narrative Poet : A Test of Invention. Lincoln: U of Nebraska Press, 1975.

McFarland, Thomas. The Masks of Keats: The Endeavour of a Poet. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Motion, Andrew. Keats. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1997.

Sider, Michael J. The Dialogic Keats : Time and History in the Major Poems. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1998.

Wolfson, Susan J., Ed. The Cambridge Companion to Keats. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

SECONDARY SOURCES BY CHAPTER