John Keats

John Keats (31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821) was an English poet, who became one of the key figures of the Romantic movement. Along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Keats was one of the second generation Romantic poets. During his short life his work was not well received by critics, but his posthumous influence on poets such as Alfred Tennyson and Wilfred Owen was significant. The poetry of Keats was characterised by elaborate word choice and sensual imagery, most notably in a series of odes which remain among the most popular poems in English literature. The letters of Keats, which include the development of his aesthetic theory of negative capability, are among the most celebrated by any English poet.

Early life

John Keats was born on 31 October 1795 to Thomas and Frances Jennings Keats. He was the oldest of their four surviving children—George (1797–1841), Thomas (1799–1818), and Frances Mary "Fanny" (1803–1889). A son was lost in infancy. John was born in central London, (though there is no clear evidence exactly where) [2]. His father was working as an ostler at the Hoop and Swan pub when John Keats was born.... On 15 April 1804, only nine months after Keats had started at Enfield, his father died of a fractured skull, falling from his horse on a return visit to the school.... In March 1810, when Keats was fourteen, his mother died, leaving the children in the custody of their grandmother....

A young poet—the Cockney School

His first surviving poem—An Imitation of Spenser—comes in 1814, when Keats was nineteen. On 1 October 1815, Keats registered to become a student at Guy's Hospital (now part of King's College London) where he would study for five years... He was also devoting increasing time to the study of literature [and to writing poetry].

The Hampstead period

Unhappy with living in London and in bad health, Keats moved into rooms at 1 Well Walk, in April 1817, with his brothers. Both John and George nursed their brother Tom, who was suffering from tuberculosis. The house in Hampstead was close to [Leigh] Hunt and others from his circle, as well as the senior poet Coleridge, living in Highgate.

In June 1818, Keats began a walking journey around Scotland, Ireland and the Lake district with his friend Charles Armitage Brown. George and his wife Georgina accompanied them as far as Lancaster and then headed to Liverpool, from where the couple would emigrate to America. (They lived in Ohio and Louisville, Kentucky until 1841 when George's investments went bad. Like both his brothers, he would die penniless and racked by tuberculosis. There would be no effective treatment for the disease till 1921.) In July, while on Mull for the walking tour, Keats caught a bad cold and by August Brown writes that his friend "was too thin and fevered to proceed on the journey". On his return south, Keats continued to nurse Tom, continuously exposing himself to the highly infectious disease. Motion argues "It was on Mull that Keats' short life started to end, and his slow death began", although biographers disagree on when the first signs of tuberculosis appear....

John Keats moved again, to live in Brown's house, the newly built, Wentworth Place, also on the edge of Hampstead Heath.... Keats composed five of his six great odes in April and May and, although it is debated in which order they were written, Ode to Psyche starts the series. According to Brown, Ode to a Nightingale was composed under their mulberry tree.

At this time he met the eighteen year old Frances (Fanny) Brawne, who eventually lived next door to Wentworth Place with her widowed mother.... He fell in love with Fanny and a year later they were betrothed, although the engagement was later broken off as his health worsened. On 21 September, Keats wrote to his friend Reynolds, introducing his last great ode: To Autumn. He says, "How beautiful the season is now—How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it [...]I never lik'd the stubbled fields as much as now—Aye, better than the chilly green of spring. Somehow the stubble plain looks warm—in the same way as some pictures look warm—this struck me so much in my Sunday's walk that I composed upon it. During 1820 Keats began showing increasingly serious signs of tuberculosis and suffered two lung haemorrhages in the first few days of February. He lost large amounts of blood in the attacks and was then bled further by his attending physician. At the suggestion of his doctors, he agreed to leave London and move to Italy with his friend Joseph Severn. On 13th September, he left for Gravesend and four days later Keats and Severn boarded the sailing brig The Maria Crowther. Keats wrote his final version of Bright Star aboard the ship.

Death

On arrival in Italy, he moved into a villa on the Spanish Steps in Rome, (now the Keats-Shelley Memorial House, a museum that is dedicated to their life and work). Despite attentive care from Severn and Dr. John Clark, the poet's health rapidly deteriorated.... John Keats died on 23 February 1821 and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome. His last request was to be buried under a tombstone, without his name, and bearing only the legend Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water. Severn and Brown erected such a stone, and under the relief of a lyre with broken strings.

Poems

Keats' odes, which many consider to be his most distinctive poetical achievements, were all composed in 1819. Algernon Charles Swinburne, in his entry on Keats for the 1882 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, was scathing in his criticism of Keats's early poems [but] rapt in admiration for Keats's "unequalled and unrivalled odes," about which he wrote: "Of these 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 to Autumn and that on a Grecian Urn ; the most radiant, fervent, and musical is that to a Nightingale; the most pictorial and perhaps the tenderest in its ardour of passionate fancy is that to Psyche; the subtlest in sweetness of thought and feeling is that on Melancholy. Greater lyrical poetry the world may have seen than any that is in these; lovelier it surely has never seen, nor ever can it possibly see... The Ode to a Nightingale, [is] one of the final masterpieces of human work in all time and for all ages."


Excerpted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Keats