John Keats

John Keats is considered one of the greatest English poets of the 19th
century, the author of Romantic classics such as "Endymion" and "Ode to a
Nightingale." Keats began his career as a surgeon's apprentice, but gave up
medicine for literary pursuits in 1814. With the help of Percy Shelley, Keats
published his first collection in 1817. His productive years between 1818
and 1820 yielded some of his best-known poems, including "Lamia," "the
Eve of St. Agnes" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn." In 1821 he left England and
went to Italy for health reasons, but died a few months later, leaving his epic
poem "Hyperion" unfinished. In his short life he influenced many English
poets, and his vivid imagery and sensual style later had an impact on the Pre-
Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of painters that included Dante Gabriel
Rossetti.

Keats had a famously intense love affair with Fanny Brawne, to whom he
was engaged but never married.

born Oct. 31, 1795, London, Eng. — died Feb. 23, 1821, Rome, Papal
States) English Romantic poet. The son of a livery-stable manager, he had a
limited formal education. He worked as a surgeon's apprentice and assistant
for several years before devoting himself entirely to poetry at age 21. His
first mature work was the sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer"
(1816). His long Endymion appeared in the same year (1818) as the first
symptoms of the tuberculosis that would kill him at age 25. During a few
intense months of 1819 he produced many of his greatest works: several
great odes (including "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode to a Nightingale," and
"To Autumn"), two unfinished versions of the story of the titan Hyperion,
and "La Belle Dame Sans Merci." Most were published in the landmark
collection Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820).
Marked by vivid imagery, great sensuous appeal, and a yearning for the lost
glories of the Classical world, his finest works are among the greatest of the
English tradition. His letters are among the best by any English poet.
The English poet John Keats (1795-1821) stressed that man's quest for
happiness and fulfillment is thwarted by the sorrow and corruption inherent
in human nature. His works are marked by rich imagery and melodic
beauty.

John Keats was born on Oct. 31, 1795, the first child of a London lower-
middle-class family. In 1803 he was sent to school at Enfield, where he
gained a favorable reputation for high spirits and boyish pugnaciousness. His
father died in an accident in 1804, and his mother in 1810, presumably of
tuberculosis. Meanwhile, Keats's interest had shifted from fighting to
reading.

When he left school in 1811, Keats was apprenticed to an apothecary-

surgeon in Edmonton. Then it was that Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene
awakened him to the charm and power of poetry. The imaginative beauty of
Spenser's world of fantasy fulfilled some romantic yearning in his adolescent
mind, and he was even more impressed by the poet's mastery of language as
evidenced in the aptness and the sensory intensity of his imagery. It was
probably during his last months at Edmonton that Keats first tried his hand at
writing: four stanzas entitled "Imitation of Spenser."

On Oct. 2, 1815, Keats was registered at Guy's Hospital, where he was to

pursue his medical studies. He was a conscientious student, but poetry
gained increasing hold on his imagination. Some growing sense of alienation
may be perceived in his first published poem, the sonnet "O solitude! If I
must with thee dwell," which Leigh Hunt printed in the Examiner on May 5,
1816.

Autumn 1816 brought decisive weeks in the maturation of Keats's art and
personality. In late September he read George Chapman's translation of
Homer, and this impressed upon him a new aspect of both Elizabethan and
Greek poetry: no longer the mellow sensuousness, the exquisite fantasy that
he had found in Spenser, but a virility in theme and style that was to
encourage him in his turn to "speak out loud and bold." In October he made
the acquaintance of Hunt and of some of the young men who were to
become his devoted friends and to whom he addressed so many admirable
letters over the next 4 years. During November and December he wrote most
of the poems for his first volume, which was published in March 1817.

Although it contains many felicitous, and at times arresting, phrases, the

book testifies to the young poet's inexperience and immaturity. The
derivative mannerisms of some of the sonnets, the easy sybaritic nature
description in "I stood tiptoe," the romantic diffuseness and facile escapism
of "Sleep and Poetry" do much to account for the criticism - though not the
venomous malice - it received at the hands of Blackwood's Magazine in
October. In retrospect, this first volume has a character of anticipation rather
than achievement.
Publication of Endymion

The same cannot be said of Endymion: A Poetic Romance, to the writing of

which Keats devoted most of his time from April to December 1817 and
which appeared in May 1818. This mythical story of the Latmian shepherd's
love for the moon goddess provided him with a narrative framework through
which he hoped to discipline his exuberant imagination; within a firm
structure that takes the hero through the bowels of the earth, under the sea,
and through the sky, he could nevertheless give free rein to his fancy in a
great variety of incidents. Keats turned the story of Endymion into an
allegory of the romantic longing to overcome the boundaries of ordinary
human experience. The similarity with Percy Bysshe Shelley's Alastor,
which had been published in 1816, is obvious; but whereas the quest led
Shelley's hero to despair and death, Endymion significantly realizes that
ultimate identification with transcendence is not to be achieved through the
unmediated vision he had sought, but through humble acceptance of human
limitations and of the misery built into man's condition.

Keats's letters reveal that at this time several of his friends were ill or
suffering from some sort of vexation. His brother was very unwell, and he
himself, after a bad cold, prophetically feared in October 1817 that "I shall
never be again secure in Robustness." Like other romantic writers, Keats had
a central need somehow to adjust the evidence that, as he put it, "The world
is full of troubles" with an exalted intuition of cosmic harmony; this
preoccupation runs as a major trend through his letters.

Another basic problem with which Keats's letters deal is how to reconcile
the rival claims of romantic subjectivity, which makes for sincerity,
concreteness, intensity, and originality, and of esthetic objectivity, which
alone raises poetry to universal meaningfulness. Such reconciliation, he
thought, had been achieved by Shakespeare through a quality which Keats,
in December 1817, had called "Negative Capability."

It may have been in a deliberate attempt to secure greater impersonality that

in March-April 1818, after the allegory of Endymion, he turned to
straightforward narrative in Isabella, which is based on a story by
Boccaccio. Although the poem is distinctly inferior, its theme was connected
with Keats's more philosophical preoccupations, as it centers on the beauty
and greatness of tragic love.
On the whole, 1818 brought a lull in Keats's creative output. His letters,
however, show that it was also a period of rapid inner growth. By May he
had become articulately conscious of several pregnant verities: that
experience, rather than unbridled fancy, is the key to true poetry; that sorrow
and suffering are not to be eschewed but should be expected - in 1819 he
was to say "greeted" - as a necessary step in the making of the soul; that no
great poetry can be achieved if "high Sensations" are not completed by
"extensive knowledge" and that he himself, in his exploration of life's "dark
passages," had not yet reached further than the "Chamber of Maiden-
Thought."

Later Works

It was presumably in order to give poetic utterance to this enriched view of

life and art that Keats started work on Hyperion in September 1818. This
new poem linked up with Endymion, as an essential part of its purpose was
to describe the growth of Apollo into a true poet through ever deeper
acceptance and understanding of change and sorrow. But Keats was unable
to get ahead with it for a number of reasons: a trip to Scotland had impaired
his health; Blackwood's had published a vitriolic attack on Endymion; his
brother, Tom, had died after several weeks' painful illness. Keats's friends
were trying to entertain him, and he was reluctantly swept up in the
absorbing trivialities of social life. Moreover, at this time he fell in love with
Fanny Brawne.

In spring 1819 Keats sought creative relief from his failure to give
satisfactory shape to his idea in new ventures which were apparently less
ambitious, yet proved to be the crowning work of his annus mirabilis.
Turning once more to verse narrative, he first produced the opulent Eve of
St. Agnes, in deliberate revulsion against what he now saw as the "mawkish"
sentimentality of Isabella. The rape of Madeline in this poem was soon to
find its dialectical counterpart in the ghostlike idealism of La Belle dame
sans merci, a ballad that tells of the mysterious seduction of a medieval
knight by another of Keats's elusive, enigmatic, half-divine ladies. Each
poem embodies an important trend in Keats's poetry: his sybaritic sense of
exquisite sensuality verging at times on eroticism, and a longing mixed with
fear and diffidence for some experience beyond human mortality.

These were followed in the spring and summer of 1819 by the first great
odes: "Ode to Psyche," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," and "Ode to a Nightingale."
These, together with the later "Ode on Indolence" and "Ode on Melancholy,"
are among the most acute imaginative explorations of the intricate relation
between the contrasting experiences and aspirations whose interplay had
always controlled Keats's inspiration: sorrow and bliss, art and reality, life
and dream, truth and romance, death and immortality.

The triumphant balance and integration achieved in the odes was inevitably
precarious. They coincided with the positive conception of the world as a
"Vale of Soulmaking," which the poet had framed in April. But incipient
financial trouble, together with his tortured love for Fanny, were beginning
to press upon Keats. The three schemes that kept him busy during the latter
half of 1819 illustrate his confusion and perplexity. In cooperation with one
of his friends, he wrote his only drama, Otho the Great, in the futile hope of
acquiring both money and public recognition. He also made his last attempt
to define the function of the poet in The Fall of Hyperion; but this, like the
former Hyperion, was never completed and remains a tantalizing fragment
of cryptic, inconclusive beauty. Significantly, the last long poem that he
managed to bring to completion was Lamia, a brilliantly ambiguous piece
which leads to the disenchanted conclusion that both the artist and the lover
live on deceptive illusions.

Keats's health had been declining for some time. In February 1820 a severe
hemorrhage in the lungs revealed the seriousness of the disease. His third
and last volume, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and Other Poems,
was printed in July. In September, Keats left for Italy on an invitation from
Shelley. He died in Rome on Feb. 23, 1821.

The son of a livery stable keeper, Keats attended school at Enfield, where he
became the friend of Charles Cowden Clarke, the headmaster's son, who
encouraged his early learning. Apprenticed to a surgeon (1811), Keats came
to know Leigh Hunt and his literary circle, and in 1816 he gave up surgery
to write poetry. His first volume of poems appeared in 1817. It included "I
stood tip-toe upon a little hill," "Sleep and Poetry," and the famous sonnet
"On First Looking into Chapman's Homer."

Endymion, a long poem, was published in 1818. Although faulty in structure,

it is nevertheless full of rich imagery and color. Keats returned from a
walking tour in the Highlands to find himself attacked in Blackwood's
Magazine-an article berated him for belonging to Leigh Hunt's "Cockney
school" of poetry-and in the Quarterly Review. The critical assaults of 1818
mark a turning point in Keats's life; he was forced to examine his work more
carefully, and as a result the influence of Hunt was diminished. However,
these attacks did not contribute to Keats's decline in health and his early
death, as Shelley maintained in his elegy "Adonais."

Keats's passionate love for Fanny Brawne seems to have begun in 1818.
Fanny's letters to Keats's sister show that her critics' contention that she was
a cruel flirt was not true. Only Keats's failing health prevented their
marriage. He had contracted tuberculosis, probably from nursing his brother
Tom, who died in 1818. With his friend, the artist Joseph Severn, Keats
sailed for Italy shortly after the publication of Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St.
Agnes, and Other Poems (1820), which contains most of his important work
and is probably the greatest single volume of poetry published in England in
the 19th cent. He died in Rome in Feb., 1821, at the age of 25.

In spite of his tragically brief career, Keats is one of the most important
English poets. He is also among the most personally appealing. Noble,
generous, and sympathetic, he was capable not only of passionate love but
also of warm, steadfast friendship. Keats is ranked, with Shelley and Byron,
as one of the three great Romantic poets. Such poems as "Ode to a
Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "To Autumn," and "Ode on
Melancholy" are unequaled for dignity, melody, and richness of sensuous
imagery. All of his poetry is filled with a mysterious and elevating sense of
beauty and joy.

Keats's posthumously published pieces include "La Belle Dame sans Merci,"
in its way as great an evocation of romantic medievalism as his "The Eve of
St. Agnes." Among his sonnets, familiar ones are "When I have fears that I
may cease to be" and "Bright star! would I were as steadfast as thou art."
"Lines on the Mermaid Tavern," "Fancy," and "Bards of Passion and of
Mirth" are delightful short poems.

Some of Keats's finest work is in the unfinished epic "Hyperion." In recent

years critical attention has focused on Keats's philosophy, which involves
not abstract thought but rather absolute receptivity to experience. This
attitude is indicated in his celebrated term "negative capability"-"to let the
mind be a thoroughfare for all thought."
Early life

John Keats was born on 31 October 1795 to Thomas and Frances Jennings
Keats. He was the eldest of their four surviving children—George (1797–
1841), Thomas (1799–1818), and Frances Mary "Fanny" (1803–89). A son
was lost in infancy. John was born in central London, although there is no
clear evidence of the exact location.[2] His father was working as a barman at
the Hoop and Swan pub when Keats was born, an establishment Thomas
later managed and where the growing family would live for some years. It is
now the "Keats at the Globe" pub, a few yards from modern day Moorgate
station.

Keats was baptised at St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate and sent to a local

dame school as an infant. In the summer of 1803, unable to attend Eton or
Harrow because of expense,[3][4] he was sent to board at the Clarke school in
Enfield, close to his grandparents' house. The headmaster, John Clarke, was
to become an important influence, mentor and friend, and introduced Keats
to a great deal of Renaissance literature including Tasso, Spenser and
Chapman's translations. In April 1804, only nine months after Keats had
started at Enfield, his father died when he fractured his skull after falling
from his horse on a return visit to the school. Thomas died intestate. Frances
remarried two months afterwards, but left her new husband soon after and,
with her four children, went to live with the children's grandmother, Alice
Jennings, in the village of Edmonton.[5] In March 1810, when Keats was 14,
his mother died, leaving the children in the custody of their grandmother.
Jennings appointed two guardians to take care of the children. That autumn,
Keats was removed from Clarke's school to apprentice with Thomas
Hammond — a surgeon and apothecary. Charles Cowden Clarke, a close
school friend of Keats, described this time as "the most placid time in
[Keats's] painful life".[6] He lodged with Hammond and slept in the attic
above the surgery.

Early career

His first surviving poem—An Imitation of Spenser—comes in 1814, when

Keats was nineteen. In 1815, Keats registered as a medical student at Guy's
Hospital (now part of King's College London). Within a month of starting,
he was accepted for a dressership position within the hospital — a
significant promotion with increased responsibility and workload, taking up
precious writing time and increasing his ambivalence to working in
medicine.[7] Strongly drawn by an ambition inspired by fellow poets such as
Leigh Hunt and Byron, but beleaguered by family financial crises that
continued to the end of his life, he suffered periods of deep depression. His
brother George wrote that John "feared that he should never be a poet, & if
he was not he would destroy himself".[8] In 1816, Keats received his
apothecary's licence but before the end of the year he announced to his
guardian that he had resolved to be a poet, not a surgeon.

Though he continued his work and training at Guy's, Keats was devoting
increasing time to the study of literature. In May 1816, Leigh Hunt, greatly
admired by Keats, agreed to publish the sonnet O Solitude in his magazine
The Examiner, a leading liberal magazine of the day.[9] It is the first
appearance of Keats's poems in print and Charles Cowden Clarke refers to it
as his friend's "red letter day",[10] first proof that John's ambitions were not
ridiculous. In the summer of that year he went down to the coastal town of
Margate with Clarke to write. There he began Calidore and initiated the era
of his great letter writing.

In October, Clarke personally introduced Keats to the influential Hunt, a

close friend of Byron and Shelley. Five months later Poems, the first volume
of Keats verse, was published.[9] It was a critical failure but Hunt went on to
publish the essay Three Young Poets (Shelley, Keats and Reynolds), along
with the sonnet on Chapman's Homer, promising great things to come.[11]He
introduced Keats to many prominent men in his circle, including editor of
The Times Thomas Barnes, writer Charles Lamb, conductor Vincent Novello
and poet John Hamilton Reynolds, who would become a close friend.[12] It
was a decisive turning point for Keats. He was established in the public eye
as a figure in, what Hunt termed, 'a new school of poetry'.[13] At this time
Keats writes to his friend Bailey "I am certain of nothing but the holiness of
the Heart's affections and the truth of the imagination — What imagination
seizes as Beauty must be truth".[14][1] This would eventually transmute into
the concluding lines of Ode on a Grecian Urn " 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'
– that is all / you know on earth, and all ye need to know".

Endymion, on its eventual publication, was also damned by the critics,

giving rise to Byron's quip that Keats was ultimately "snuffed out by an
article". One particularly harsh review by John Wilson Croker appeared in
the April 1818 edition of The Quarterly Review:
[...] It is not, we say, that the author has not powers of language, rays of
fancy, and gleams of genius – he has all these; but he is unhappily a disciple
of the new school of what has been somewhere called 'Cockney Poetry';
which may be defined to consist of the most incongruous ideas in the most
uncouth language [...] There is hardly a complete couplet enclosing a
complete idea in the whole book. He wanders from one subject to another,
from the association, not of ideas, but of sounds [...]"[15]

John Gibson Lockhart wrote in Blackwoods Magazine

To witness the disease of any human understanding, however feeble, is

distressing; but the spectacle of an able mind reduced to a state of insanity is,
of course, ten times more afflicting. It is with such sorrow as this that we
have contemplated the case of Mr John Keats. [...] He was bound apprentice
some years ago to a worthy apothecary in town. But all has been undone by
a sudden attack of the malady [...] For some time we were in hopes that he
might get off with a violent fit or two; but of late the symptoms are terrible.
The phrenzy of the "Poems" was bad enough in its way; but it did not alarm
us half so seriously as the calm, settled, imperturbable drivelling idiocy of
Endymion. [...] It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than
a starved poet; so back to the [apothecary] shop Mr John, back to ‘plasters,
pills, and ointment boxes’.[16]

It was Lockhart at Blackwoods who had coined the defamatory term "the
Cockney School" for Hunt and his circle, including William Hazlitt and,
squarely, 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 colleges and they were not from the upper classes.

In bad health and unhappy with living in London, in April 1817 Keats
moved with his brothers into rooms at 1 Well Walk. Both John and George
nursed their brother Tom, who was suffering from tuberculosis. The house in
Hampstead was close to Hunt and others from his circle, as well as the
senior poet Coleridge who at the time lived in Highgate.[17]

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.[18] [19][20] In
July, while on the Isle of Mull for the walking tour, Keats caught a bad cold
and "was too thin and fevered to proceed on the journey". [21] On his return
south, Keats continued to nurse Tom, exposing himself to the highly
infectious disease. Some biographers suggest that this is when tuberculosis –
his "family disease" – first takes hold. [22] [23] [24] Tom Keats died on 1
December 1818.

Wentworth Place

Wentworth Place (left)

John Keats moved to the newly built Wentworth Place, owned by his friend
Charles Armitage Brown, also on the edge of Hampstead Heath, just a ten
minute walk south of his old home in Well Walk. This winter of 1818,
though troubled, marks the beginning of Keats's annus mirabilis in which he
wrote his most mature work.[1] He had been greatly inspired by a series of
recent lectures by Hazlitt on English poets and poetic identity.[25] Keats
composed five of his six great odes there 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 a mulberry
tree in the garden.[26][27]

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 behind
the books. On inquiry, I found those scraps, four or five in number,
contained his poetic feelings on the song of our nightingale.[28]

Dilke, co-owner of the house, strenuously denied the story, printed in

Milnes' 1848 biography of Keats, dismissing it as "pure delusion".

In 1819, Keats wrote The Eve of St. Agnes, La Belle Dame Sans Merci,
Hyperion, Lamia and Otho (critically damned and not dramatised until
1950). The poems Fancy and Bards of passion and of mirth were inspired by
the gardens. In September, very short of money, 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 [...] a poem unfit for ladies". [29]
The final volume 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.

Wentworth Place now houses the Keats House museum.[30]

Fanny Brawne and Isabella Jones

Main article: Fanny Brawne

Ambrotype of Fanny Brawne taken circa 1850 (photograph on glass)

Letters and poem drafts suggest that Keats first met Frances (Fanny) Brawne
between September and November 1818.[31] It is likely that the 18-year-old
Brawne was visiting the Dilke family at Wentworth Place, before she lived
there. Like Keats, Brawne was a Londoner – born in the hamlet of West End
near Hampstead on 9 August 1800. Her grandfather had kept a London inn,
as Keats's father had done, and had also lost several members of her family
to tuberculosis. She shared her first name with both Keats's sister and
mother. Fanny had a talent for dress-making, as well as for languages and
repartee. She wrote, "I am not a great poetry reader" but that she had "a
natural theatrical bent".[32] During November 1818 an intimacy sprang up
between Keats and Brawne[33] but was very much shadowed by the
impending death of Tom Keats, whom John was nursing.

That year, he met another woman for whom he felt a conflicted passion –
Isabella Jones – "beautiful, talented, witty". [34] He had met her in Hastings
while on holiday in June. He "frequented her rooms" in the winter of 1818–
19, and says in his letters to George that he "warmed with her" and "kissed
her", though it is unclear how close they ultimately became.[35] Biographers
debate how influential she was to Keats's writing. Gittings maintained that
The Eve of St Agnes and The Eve of St Mark were suggested by her, that the
lyric Hush, Hush! ["o sweet Isabel"] was about her and the first version of
Bright Star might well have been for her. [36] [37]
On 3 April 1819, Brawne and her widowed mother moved into the other half
of Dilke's Wentworth Place and Keats and Brawne were able 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). It was a work in progress and he continued to work
on the poem until the last months of his life. The poem came to be forever
associated with their relationship. "It was", says Gittings, "a declaration of
his love. [...] All his desires were concentrated on Fanny". [38] From this point
we have no documented mention of Isabella Jones again.[38]

Sometime before the end of June, he at last arrived at some sort of

understanding with Brawne. This was far from a formal engagement; he still
had far too little to offer.[39] Keats endured great conflict knowing his
expectations as a struggling poet in increasingly hard financial straits would
preclude marriage to Brawne. Their love remained unconsummated;
jealousy for his unbound 'Star' began to gnaw at him. Darkness, disease and
depression were close in around him and are reflected in poems of the time
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". [39] Keats writes to Brawne
in another of his many hundreds of notes and letters:

My love has made me selfish. I cannot exist 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 present moment as
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'd at 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. (Letter, 13 October 1819).

Tuberculosis took hold and he was advised to move to a warmer country by

his doctors. In September 1820 they had their final parting. Keats left for
Rome and they both knew it was very likely they'd never see each other
again. He died there five months later.

None of Brawne's letters to Keats survive, though we have his own letters.
As the poet had requested, Brawne's were destroyed upon his death. She
stayed in mourning for Keats for six years. In 1833, more than 12 years after
his death, she married and went on to have three children, outliving Keats by
more than 40 years. [30] [40]

Death

During 1820, Keats displayed increasingly serious symptoms of

tuberculosis, to the extent that he suffered two lung haemorrhages in the first
few days of February.[41][42] He lost large amounts of blood and was bled
further by the attending physician. Hunt nursed him in London for much of
the summer. At the suggestion of his doctors, he agreed to move to Italy
with his friend Joseph Severn. On 13 September, they left for Gravesend and
four days later boarded the sailing brig The Maria Crowther. Keats wrote his
final revisions of Bright Star aboard the ship. The journey was a minor
catastrophe – storms broke out followed by a dead calm that slowed the
ship’s progress. When it finally docked in Naples, the ship was held in
quarantine for ten days because of a suspected outbreak of cholera in Britain.
Keats reached Rome on November 14 by which time all hope of a warmer
climate had evaporated.[43]

Keats's House in Rome

On arrival in Italy, he moved into a villa on the Spanish Steps in Rome –

today the Keats-Shelley Memorial House museum. Despite care from
Severn and Dr. John Clark, his health rapidly deteriorated. The medical
attention Keats received may have hastened his death. [44] In November
1820, Clark declared that the source of his illness was "mental exertion" and
that the source was largely situated in his stomach. Clark eventually
diagnosed consumption (tuberculosis) and placed Keats on a starvation diet
of an anchovy and a piece of bread a day – this was intended to reduce the
blood flow to his stomach. He also bled the poet; a standard treatment of the
day, but was likely a significant contributor to Keats's weakness.[45]

Keats's friend Brown writes:

They could have used opium in small doses, and Keats had asked Severn to
buy a bottle of opium when they were setting off on their voyage. What
Severn didn't realise was that Keats saw it as a possible resource if he
wanted to commit suicide. He tried to get the bottle from Severn on the
voyage but Severn wouldn't let him have it. Then in Rome he tried again.
[...] Severn was in such a quandary he didn't know what to do, so in the end
he went to the doctor who took it away. As a result Keats went through
dreadful agonies with nothing to ease the pain at all.[45]

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: /
Here lies One / Whose Name was writ in Water
24 February 1821

There is a discrepancy of one day between the official date of death and the
grave marking. Severn and Brown had added their lines to the stone in
protest at the critical reception of Keats's work. Hunt blamed his death on
the scathing attack of "Endymion" by the Quarterly Review. Seven weeks
after the funeral, Shelley memorialised Keats in his poem Adonaïs.[46] Clark
saw to the planting daisies on the grave, saying that Keats would have
wished it. For public health reasons, the Italian health authorities burned the
furniture in Keats's room, scraped the walls, made new windows, doors and
flooring. [47]

In 2009, Marsh wrote, "In the old part of the graveyard, barely a field when
Keats was buried here, there are now umbrella pines, myrtle shrubs, roses,
and carpets of wild violets. [...] Shelley, one of Keats’s most fervent
champions, is also buried here"and Severn is buried next the friend he
nursed till the end.[48][43]

Poetry

Relief on wall near his grave in Rome

When Keats died at the age of 25, he had been seriously writing poetry for
barely six years — from 1814 until the summer of 1820 – and publishing for
four. His first poem, the sonnet O Solitude appeared in the Examiner in May
1816, while his collection Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes and other
poems came in July 1820 before his final voyage to Rome. The compression
of his poetic apprenticeship and maturity into so short a time is just one
remarkable aspect of Keats's work. [1] Although he was prolific during his
short writing life, and is now one of the most studied and admired of British
poets, his reputation rests on a fairly small body of work, centered on the
Odes.[52]

Poetry did not come easy to Keats. Throughout his life he maintained a
strong sense of the particular and fantastic, yet his early work was
unremarkable and roundly dismissed by some critics who saw his position as
only afforded by his influential friends. Keats's most successful verse came
as a result of a deliberate and prolonged self-education in classical literature.
Although he said "if poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it
had better not come at all", and he may have possessed an innate poetic
sensibility, his early works were of a poet learning his craft. According to
literary historian William Walsh it was often vague – "infatuated by
the...languorously narcotic which often dimmed his clear eye for the
objective". It was only in the creative outpouring in the last years of his short
life that he was able to express in craft the inner intensity for which he is has
been lauded since his death. [53] Keats felt he had made no mark in his
lifetime. Knowing he was dying, he had written to Fanny Brawne in
February 1820, "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."

It is believed that, in his lifetime, sales of Keats's three volumes of poetry

amounted to only 200 copies.[54] Yet, Motion argues: "When he died at the
tragically early age of 25, his admirers praised him for thinking "on his
pulses" – for having developed a style which was more heavily loaded with
sensualities, more gorgeous in its effects, more voluptuously alive to
actualities than any poet who had come before him." In his own words,
Keats sought to "load every rift" with ore. [55]

Keats's skills were acknowledged in his lifetime by influential allies such as

Shelley, Hunt and to a lesser extent Byron; [54] however, he received harsh
reviews from critics and publishers. Shelley had corresponded often with
Keats when he was ill in Rome. He later felt that Keats's death had been
brought on by bad reviews in the Quarterly Review and seven weeks after
the funeral wrote Adonaïs, a despairing elegy of 495 lines and 55 Spenserian
stanzas. It was published that July and he came to view as his "least
imperfect" work. He felt that Keats's early death was a personal and public
tragedy:
[...] The loveliest and the last,
The bloom, whose petals nipped before they blew
Died on the promise of the fruit.
[56][57]

Thirty years later Keats's ignominious public profile began to alter. With
Milnes's full biography in 1848 and Tennyson as his champion, Keats's work
slowly entered the established canon of English literature. In 1882,
Swinburne wrote in the Encyclopedia Britannica that "the Ode to a
Nightingale, [is] one of the final masterpieces of human work in all time and
for all ages".[58] Vendler at Harvard says the odes "are a group of works in
which the English language find ultimate embodiment".[59] Professor Bate
declared of To Autumn: "Each generation has found it one of the most nearly
perfect poems in English"[60] and M. R. Ridley claimed the ode "is the most
serenely flawless poem in our language."[61]

Letters

Keats and his friends were prolific letter writers – poets, novelists, editors.
When his brother George goes to America, Keats writes to him in great
detail – the body of letters becoming "the real diary of his life" – an
exposition of his philosophy, self-revelation and first drafts of poems
containing some of Keats's finest writing and thought.[62] According to
Strachan, "Keats's entertaining and illuminating letters rank highly in the
history of all English literary correspondence".[63]

In the letters he coined ideas such as Negative capability, The Chameleon

Poet and the Mansion of Many Apartments. They came to gain common
currency and capture the public imagination, despite only making single
appearances as phrases in his correspondence. [64] "My Imagination is a
Monastry and I am its Monk", he writes to Shelley. In a letter to George he
calls the world "the vale of Soul-making", [65] again and again turning to the
question of what it means to be a poet.[25]

In a letter to George, he describes Negative capability as the poetic state in

which we are "capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without
any irritable reaching after fact & reason. [...Being] content with half
knowledge" where one trusts in the heart's perceptions. [66] He writes later "I
am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth
of Imagination – What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth –
whether it existed before or not – for I have the same Idea of all our Passions
as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty." [67]

In his letter to Richard Woodhouse, October 27th, 1818, he famously

describes the empty potential of the poetical character:

[It] has no self – it is every thing and nothing – It has no character – it enjoys
light and shade; [...] What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the
camelion [chameleon] Poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side
of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both
end in speculation. A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence;
because he has no Identity – he is continually in for – and filling some other
Body – The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures
of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute – the
poet has none; no identity – he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God's
Creatures.

On 21 September, Keats wrote to Reynolds

"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".[68]

The final stanza of his last great ode: "To Autumn" runs:

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; [...]

Long after his death, To Autumn would go on to become one of the most
highly regarded poems in the English language.[69][70]