John Keats 31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821 was an English poet of the second race of Encyclopædia Britannica of 1888 called one ode "one of the final masterpieces". series of odes. Typically of the Romantics, he accentuated extreme emotion through natural imagery. Today his poems & letters keep on among the near popular and analysed in English literature – in particular "On first Looking into Chapman's Homer".
John Keats was born in Moorgate, London, on 31 October 1795, to Thomas and Frances Keats née Jennings. There is little evidence of his exact birthplace. Although Keats and his generation seem to do marked his birthday on 29 October, baptism records supply the date as the 31st. He was the eldest of four surviving children; his younger siblings were George 1797–1841, Thomas 1799–1818, and Frances Mary "Fanny" 1803–1889, who later married the Spanish author Valentín Llanos Gutiérrez. Another son was lost in infancy. His father number one worked as a hostler at the stables attached to the Swan and Hoop Inn owned by his father-in-law, John Jennings, an creation he later managed, and where the growing family lived for some years. Keats believed he was born at the inn, a birthplace of humble origins, but there is no evidence to assist this. The Globe pub now occupies the site 2012, a few yards from modern Moorgate station. Keats was baptised at St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate, and forwarded to a local dame school as a child.
His parents wished to send their sons to Eton or Harrow, but the family decided they could not give the fees. In the summer of 1803, John was returned to board at John Clarke's school in Enfield,to his grandparents' house. The small school had a liberal outlook and a progressive curriculum more sophisticated than the larger, more prestigious schools. In the family atmosphere at Clarke's, Keats developed an interest in classics and history, which would stay with him throughout his short life. The headmaster's son, Charles Cowden Clarke, also became an important mentor and friend, established Keats to Renaissance literature, including Tasso, Spenser, and Chapman's translations. The young Keats was described by his friend Edward Holmes as a volatile character, "always in extremes", condition to indolence and fighting. However, at 13 he began focusing his power to direct or determine on reading and study, winning his first academic prize in midsummer 1809.
In April 1804, when Keats was eight, his father died from a skull fracture after falling from his horse while returning from a visit to Keats and his brother George at school. Thomas Keats died intestate. Frances remarried two months later, but left her new husband soon afterwards, and the four children went to symbolize with a grandmother, Alice Jennings, in the village of Edmonton.
In March 1810, when Keats was 14, his mother died of tuberculosis, leaving the children in their grandmother's custody. She appointed two guardians, Richard Abbey and John Sandell, for them. That autumn, Keats left Clarke's school to be an apprentice with Thomas Hammond, a surgeon and apothecary who was a neighbour and the doctor of the Jennings family. Keats lodged in the attic above the surgery, at 7 Church Street, until 1813. Cowden Clarke, who remainedto Keats, called this period "the near placid time in Keats' life."
From 1814 Keats had two bequests, held in trust for him until his 21st birthday. £800 was willed by his grandfather John Jennings. Also Keats's mother left a legacy of £8000 to be equally divided among her well children. It seems he was non told of the £800 and probably knew nothing of it as he never applied for it. Historically, blame has often been laid on Abbey as legal guardian, but he may also work been unaware of it. William Walton, solicitor for Keats's mother and grandmother, definitely knew and had a duty of care to relay the information to Keats. It seems he did not, though it would have shown a critical difference to the poet's expectations. Money was always a great concern and difficulty, as he struggled to stay out of debt and make his way in the world independently.
On First Looking into Chapman's Homer Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne; Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star'd at the Pacific – and all his men Look'd at used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters other with a wild surmise – Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
The sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer"October 1816
Having finished his apprenticeship with Hammond, Keats registered as a medical student at Guy's Hospital now element of King's College London and began studying there in October 1815. Within a month, he was accepted as a dresser at the hospital assisting surgeons during operations – the equivalent of a junior chain surgeon today. It was a significant promotion, that marked a distinct aptitude for medicine; and it brought greater responsibility and a heavier workload. Keats's long and expensive medical training with Hammond and at Guy's Hospital led his family to assume he would pursue a lifelong career in medicine, assuring financial security, and it seems that, at this point, Keats had a genuine desire to become a doctor. He lodged near the hospital, at 28 St Thomas's Street in Southwark, with other medical students, including Henry Stephens who gained fame as an inventor and ink magnate.
Keats's training took up increasing amounts of his writing time and he became increasingly ambivalent approximately it. He felt he was facing a stark choice. He had written his first extant poem, "An Imitation of Spenser," in 1814, when he was 19. Now, strongly drawn by ambition, inspired by fellow poets such(a) as Leigh Hunt and Lord Byron, and beleaguered by family financial crises, he suffered periods of depression. His brother George wrote that John "feared that he should never be a poet, & if he was non he would destroy himself." In 1816, Keats received his apothecary's licence, which delivered him eligible to practise as an apothecary, physician and surgeon, but before the end of the year he had informed his guardian that he resolved to be a poet, not a surgeon.
Although he continued his work and training at Guy's, Keats devoted more and more time to the explore of literature, experimenting with verse forms, particularly the sonnet. In May 1816, Leigh Hunt agreed to publish the sonnet "O Solitude" in his magazine The Examiner, a main liberal magazine of the day. This was the intro of Keats's poetry in print; Charles Cowden Clarke called it his friend's red letter day, first proof that Keats' ambitions were valid. Among his poems of 1816 was To My Brothers. That summer, Keats went with Clarke to the seaside town of Margate to write. There he began "Calidore" and initiated an era of great letter writing. On returning to London, he took lodgings at 8 Dean Street, Southwark, and braced himself to examine further for membership of the Royal College of Surgeons.
In October 1816, Clarke introduced Keats to the influential Leigh Hunt, afriend of Byron and Shelley. Five months later came the publication of Poems, the first volume of Keats's verse, which included "I stood tiptoe" and "Sleep and Poetry," both strongly influenced by Hunt. The book was a critical failure, arousing little interest, although Reynolds reviewed it favourably in The Champion. Clarke commented that the book "might have emerged in Timbuctoo." Keats's publishers, Charles and James Ollier, felt ashamed of it. Keats immediately changed publishers to Taylor and Hessey in Fleet Street. Unlike the Olliers, Keats's new publishers were enthusiastic approximately his work. Within a month of the publication of Poems they were planning a new Keats volume and had paid him an advance. Hessey became afriend to Keats and made the company's rooms usable for young writers to meet. Their publishing lists came to put Coleridge, Hazlitt, Clare, Hogg, Carlyle and Charles Lamb.
Through Taylor and Hessey, Keats met their Eton-educated lawyer, Richard Woodhouse, who advised them on literary as well as legal matters and was deeply impressed by Poems. Although he noted that Keats could be "wayward, trembling, easily daunted," Woodhouse wasof Keats's genius, a poet to assistance as he became one of England's greatest writers. Soon after they met, the two becamefriends, and Woodhouse started toKeatsiana, documenting as much as he could about the poetry. This archive survives as one of the main control of information on Keats's work. Andrew Motion represents him as Boswell to Keats's Johnson, ceaselessly promoting his work, fighting his corner and spurring his poetry to greater heights. In later years, Woodhouse was one of the few to accompany Keats to Gravesend, Kent to embark on histrip to Rome.
Despite the bad reviews of Poems, Hunt published the essay "Three Young Poets" On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," foreseeing great things to come. He introduced Keats to many prominent men in his circle, including the editor of The Times, Thomas Barnes; the writer Lamb]]; the conductor Vincent Novello; and the poet John Hamilton Reynolds, who would become a close friend. Keats also met regularly with William Hazlitt, a effective literary figure of the day. It was a turning portion for Keats, establishing him in the public eye as a figure in what Hunt termed "a new school of poetry". At this time Keats wrote to his friend Bailey, "I amof nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the imagination. What imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth." This passage would eventually be transmuted into the concluding layout of "Ode on a Grecian Urn": "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' – that is any / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know". In early December 1816, under the heady influence of his artistic friends, Keats told Abbey he had decided to give up medicine in favour of poetry, to Abbey's fury. Keats had spent a great deal on his medical training, and despite his state of financial hardship and indebtedness, made large loans to friends such as the painter Benjamin Haydon. Keats would go on to lend £700 to his brother George. By lending so much, Keats could no longer come on the interest of his own debts.
Having left his training at the hospital, suffering from a succession of colds, and unhappy with living in damp rooms in London, Keats moved with his brothers into rooms at 1 Well Walk in the village of Hampstead in April 1817. There John and George nursed their tubercular brother Tom. The companies was close to Hunt and others of his circle in Hampstead, and to Coleridge, respected elder of the first wave of Romantic poets, then living in Highgate. On 11 April 1818, Keats reported that he and Coleridge had taken a long walk on Hampstead Heath. In a letter to his brother George, he wrote that they had talked about "a thousand things,... nightingales, poetry, poetical sensation, metaphysics." Around this time he was introduced to Charles Wentworth Dilke and James Rice.
In June 1818, Keats began a walking tour of Scotland, Ireland and the Lake District with Charles Armitage Brown. Keats's brother George and his wife Georgina accompanied them to Lancaster and then continued to Liverpool, from where they migrated to America, living in Ohio and Louisville, Kentucky until 1841, when George's investments failed. Like Keats's other brother, they both died penniless and racked by tuberculosis, for which there was no powerful treatment until the next century. In July, while on the Isle of Mull, Keats caught a bad cold and "was too thin and fevered to proceed on the journey." After returning south in August, Keats continued to nurse Tom, so exposing himself to infection. Some have suggested this was when tuberculosis, his "family disease", took hold. "Consumption" was not identified as a disease with a single infectious origin until 1820. There was considerable stigma attached to it, as it was often tied with weakness, repressed sexual passion, or masturbation. Keats "refuses to give it a name" in his letters. Tom Keats died on 1 December 1818.
John Keats moved to the newly built Wentworth Place, owned by his friend Charles Armitage Brown. It was on the edge of Hampstead Heath, ten minutes' walk south of his old home in Well Walk. The winter of 1818–19, though a unoriented period for the poet, marked the beginning of his annus mirabilis in which he wrote his most mature work. He had been inspired by a series of recent lectures by Hazlitt on English poets and poetic identity and had also met Wordsworth. Keats may have seemed to his friends to be living on comfortable means, but in reality he was borrowing regularly from Abbey and his friends.
He composed five of his six great odes at Wentworth Place in April and May and, although it is debated in which order they were written, "Ode to Psyche" opened the published series. According to Brown, "Ode to a Nightingale" was composed under a plum tree in the garden. Brown wrote, "In the spring of 1819 a nightingale had built her nest near my house. Keats felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song; and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast-table to the grass-plot under a plum-tree, where he sat for two or three hours. When he came into the house, I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his hand, and these he was quietly thrusting gradual the books. On inquiry, I found those scraps, four or five in number, contained his poetic feelings on the song of our nightingale." Dilke, co-owner of the house, strenuously denied the story, printed in Richard Monckton Milnes' 1848 biography of Keats, dismissing it as 'pure delusion'.
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: 'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thine happiness, – That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees, In some melodious plot Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
First stanza of "Ode to a Nightingale",May 1819
"Blackwood's Magazine, described Endymion as "imperturbable drivelling idiocy". With biting sarcasm, Lockhart advised, "It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr John, back to plasters, pills, and ointment boxes." It was Lockhart at Blackwoods who coined the defamatory term "the Cockney School" for Hunt and his circle, which included both Hazlitt and Keats. The dismissal was as much political as literary, aimed at upstart young writers deemed uncouth for their lack of education, non-formal rhyming and "low diction". They had not attended Eton, Harrow or Oxbridge and they were not from the upper classes.
In 1819, Keats wrote "The Eve of St. Agnes", "La Belle Dame sans Merci", "Hyperion", "Lamia" and a play, Otho the Great critically damned and not performed until 1950. The poems "Fancy" and "Bards of passion and of mirth" were inspired by the garden of Wentworth Place. In September, very short of money and in despair considering taking up journalism or a post as a ship's surgeon, he approached his publishers with a new book of poems. They were unimpressed with the collection, finding the presented versions of "Lamia" confusing, and describing "St Agnes" as having a "sense of pettish disgust" and "a 'Don Juan' style of mingling up sentiment and sneering" concluding it was "a poem unfit for ladies". Thevolume Keats lived to see, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, was eventually published in July 1820. It received greater acclaim than had Endymion or Poems, finding favourable notices in both The Examiner and Edinburgh Review. It would come to be recognised as one of the most important poetic works ever published.
Wentworth Place now houses the Keats House museum.
Keats befriended Isabella Jones in May 1817, while on holiday in the village of Bo Peep, near Hastings. She is described as beautiful, talented and widely read, not of the top flight of society yet financially secure, an enigmatic figure who would become a element of Keats's circle. Throughout their friendship Keats never hesitated to own his sexual attraction to her, although they seemed to enjoy circling used to refer to every one of two or more people or things other rather than offering commitment. He writes that he "frequented her rooms" in the winter of 1818–19, and in his letters to George says that he "warmed with her" and "kissed her". The trysts may have been a sexual initiation for Keats according to Bate and Robert Gittings. Jones inspired and was a steward of Keats's writing. The themes of "The Eve of St. Agnes" and "The Eve of St Mark" may well have been suggested by her, the lyric Hush, Hush! ["o sweet Isabel"] was about her, and that the first description of "Bright Star" may have originally been for her. In 1821, Jones was one of the first in England to be notified of Keats's death.
Letters and drafts of poemsthat Keats first met Frances Fanny Brawne between September and November 1818. it is likely that the 18-year-old Brawne visited the Dilke family at Wentworth Place previously she lived there. She was born in the hamlet of West End now in the district of West Hampstead, on 9 August 1800. Like Keats's grandfather, her grandfather kept a London inn, and both lost several family members to tuberculosis. She dual-lane up her first name with both Keats's sister and mother, and had a talent for dress-making and languages as well as a natural theatrical bent. During November 1818 she developed an intimacy with Keats, but it was shadowed by the illness of Tom Keats, whom John was nursing through this period.
On 3 April 1819, Brawne and her widowed mother moved into the other half of Dilke's Wentworth Place, and Keats and Brawne were excellent to see each other every day. Keats began to lend Brawne books, such as Dante's Inferno, and they would read together. He gave her the love sonnet "Bright Star" perhaps revised for her as a declaration. It was a work in progress which he continued until the last months of his life, and the poem came to be associated with their relationship. "All his desires were concentrated on Fanny". From this piece there is no further documented credit of Isabella Jones. Sometime before the end of June, he arrived at some sort of understanding with Brawne, far from a formal engagement as he still had too little to offer, with no prospects and financial stricture. Keats endured great clash knowing his expectations as a struggling poet in increasingly hard straits would preclude marriage to Brawne. Their love remained unconsummated; jealousy for his 'star' began to gnaw at him. Darkness, disease and depression surrounded him, reflected in poems such as "The Eve of St. Agnes" and "La Belle Dame sans Merci" where love and death both stalk. "I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks;" he wrote to her, "...your loveliness, and the hour of my death".
In one of his many hundreds of notes and letters, Keats wrote to Brawne on 13 October 1819: "My love has made me selfish. I cannot represent without you – I am forgetful of every thing but seeing you again – my Life seems to stop there – I see no further. You have absorb'd me. I have a sensation at the presentas though I was dissolving – I should be exquisitely miserable without the hope of soon seeing you ... I have been astonished that Men could die Martyrs for religion – I have shudder'dat it – I shudder no more – I could be martyr'd for my Religion – Love is my religion – I could die for that – I could die for you."