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Keats

This document provides a biography of the English Romantic poet John Keats. It details the key events in his life, including his education and early attempts at poetry. It describes his meeting with other major literary figures of the time like Leigh Hunt and Percy Bysshe Shelley. The document outlines Keats's major works produced between 1817-1820, including Endymion, Hyperion, and his famous odes. It discusses the negative reviews some works received and Keats's declining health from tuberculosis. In the end, Keats traveled to Italy with a friend in hopes the climate would improve his health, but he ultimately died in Rome at a young age.

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Siddhartha Singh
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292 views2 pages

Keats

This document provides a biography of the English Romantic poet John Keats. It details the key events in his life, including his education and early attempts at poetry. It describes his meeting with other major literary figures of the time like Leigh Hunt and Percy Bysshe Shelley. The document outlines Keats's major works produced between 1817-1820, including Endymion, Hyperion, and his famous odes. It discusses the negative reviews some works received and Keats's declining health from tuberculosis. In the end, Keats traveled to Italy with a friend in hopes the climate would improve his health, but he ultimately died in Rome at a young age.

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Siddhartha Singh
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KEATS, John (1795-1821), the son of the manager of a livery stables in Moorfields, who died when he

was 8; his mother remarried, but died of tuberculosis when he was 14. The oldest of the family, he
remained deeply attached to his brothers George and Tom and to his sister Fanny. He was well
educated at Clarke's school, Enfield, where he began a translation of the Aeneid, and in 181 o was
apprenticed to an apothecary-surgeon. His first efforts at writing poetry appear to date from 1814,
and include an 'Imitation of Spenser'; his school friend Cowden-*Clarke recorded the profound effect
of early reading of *Spenser. In 1815 Keats cancelled his fifth year of apprenticeship and became a
student at Guy's Hospital; to the same year belong 'Ode to Apollo' and 'Hymn to Apollo'. In 1816 he
was licensed to practise as an apothecary, but in spite of precarious finances abandoned the
profession for poetry. In 1816 he also met Leigh *Hunt, who published in the same year in the *
Examiner Keats's poem, 'O Solitude', and in the course of a survey of young poets in the same
journal he included Keats's sonnet 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer'. Keats met * Shelley and
*Haydon, began to plan *Endymion, and wrote 'I stood tiptoe upon a little hill' as a first effort
towards that poem. His first volume of poems was published in March 1817. It included, among
sonnets, epistles, and miscellaneous poems, T stood tiptoe upon a little hill' and 'Sleep and Poetry'.
There were at first some pleasing reviews, but public interest was not aroused and sales were
meagre; and in the autumn came the first of *Lockhart's harsh attacks in *Blackwood's, labelling
Keats and his associates as members of the socalled *Cockney School. He finished the first draft of
Endymion and during the winter of 1817-18 saw something of *Wordsworth and *Hazlitt, both of
whom much influenced his thought and practice. In December Haydon gave his 'immortal dinner',
whose guests included Wordsworth, *Lamb, and Keats. Endymion, dedicated to *Chatterton, whom
Keats greatly admired, was published in the spring of 1818, and ^Isabella, or The Pot of Basil'
finished in May. With his friend Charles Armitage Brown (1786- 1842) Keats then toured the Lakes,
spent July and August in Scotland, and included a brief visit to Northern Ireland. He had travelled
frequently in southern England but he had never before seen scenery of rugged grandeur. It moved
him deeply and he made full use of it when he came to write *Hyperion. Bitter attacks on Endymion
came in the autumn from Lockhart in Blackwood's and from the *Quarterly Review. For the time
being Keats concealed his pain and wrote to his brother George that, in spite of the reviews, T think I
shall be among the English poets after my death', but his friends believed the wound was very deep.
Meanwhile his brother Tom was very ill and Keats spent much time with him. When Tom died in
December Keats moved into his friend Brown's house in Hampstead, now known as Keats House.
There, in the early winter, he met Fanny *Brawne, with whom he fell deeply in love, and with whom
he remained in love until his death. During the course of the summer and autumn of 1818 his sore
throats had become more frequent and persistent. Nevertheless September 1818 marked the
beginning of what is sometimes referred to as the Great Year; he began Hyperion in its first version,
abandoning it a year later; he wrote, consecutively, *'The Eve of St Agnes', 'The Eve of St Mark', the
'Ode to Psyche', *'La Belle Dame sans Merci', *'Ode to a Nightingale', and probably at about the
same time the *'Ode on a Grecian Urn', 'Ode on Melancholy', and 'Ode on Indolence'; *'Lamia Part I',
*'Otho the Great' (in collaboration with Brown); the second version of Hyperion, called The Fall of
Hyperion, *'To Autumn', and 'Lamia Part II'. During this year he was beset with financial problems,
both his own and those of his friends and relations, and intensely preoccupied with his love for
Fanny, to whom he became engaged. In the winter of 1819 he began the unfinished 'The Cap and
Bells', but he became increasingly ill with tuberculosis and his great creative work was now over. His
second volume of poems, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems, was published in
July 1820, and included, as well as the title poems, five odes, Hyperion, 'Fancy', and other works. The
volume was generally well received, gaining much praise in some quarters, with criticism from
Blackwood's much muted, but the sales were very slow. Shelley invited Keats to Italy and in
September, after sorting out his copyrights and financial affairs, Keats set off with his friend *Severn.
They did not go to the Shelleys but settled in Rome, where Keats died the following February. Keats
has always been regarded as one of the principal figures in the *Romantic movement, and his
stature as a poet has grown steadily through all changes of fashion. *Tennyson considered him the
greatest poet of the 19th cent., and M. * Arnold commended his 'intellectual and spiritual passion'
for beauty; in the 20th cent, he has been discussed and reconsidered by critics from T. S. *Eliot and
*Leavis to Trilling (The Opposing Self 1955) and Christopher Ricks (Keats and Embarrassment, 1974).
His letters, published in 1848 and 1878, have come to be regarded with almost the admiration given
to his poetry, to which many of them act as a valuable commentary. He wrote fully and revealingly
to Fanny Brawne, to his brothers and sister, to Shelley, Leigh Hunt, Haydon, Severn, and many
others, mixing the everyday events of his own life with a lively and delicate interest in that of his
correspondents, and displaying wit and high spirits as well as his profoundest thoughts on love,
poetry, and the nature of man. T. S. Eliot described the letters as 'certainly the most notable and
most important ever written by any English poet' (The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 1933).
The major biographies are by W. J. Bate (1963) R. *Gittings (1968), and Andrew * Motion (1997).

'Ode to a Nightingale', a poem by *Keats, written 1819, published 1820. Keats's friend Charles Brown
relates that a nightingale had nested near his house in Hampstead (now known as Keats House), and
that one morning Keats sat under a plum-tree in the garden composing his ode on 'some scraps of
paper'. Briefly, the poem is a meditation on the immortal beauty of the nightingale's song and the
sadness of the observer, who must in the end accept sorrow and mortality.

'Ode on a Grecian Urn', a poem by * Keats, written 1819, published 1820. While he describes the
various pastoral scenes of love, beauty, and joy illustrated on the urn, the poet reflects on the
eternal quality of art and the fleeting nature of human love and happiness. The last two lines are
particularly well known and their meaning much debated: 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,'—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know

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