John Keats
1795–1821

John Keats was born about 31 October 1795, in London, the son of a livery-stable keeper, and went to school in Enfield. In 1822 he was apprenticed to an Edmonton surgeon, during 1815–17 continued his studies at the London hospitals, then withdrew from medicine to devote himself wholly to poetry. He had already the acquaintance of Charles Cowden Clarke (son of his Enfield schoolmaster), of Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt, Haydon, Shelley and Godwin. His first volume, Poems (1817), is coloured throughout by the sentimental tone of the later eighteenth century, and contains many mannerisms borrowed from Hunt. Endymion (1818) is Elizabethan-romantic; and though it still abounds in over-sensuous pictures and fancifully coined words, it breathes the ‘morning freshness’ of Chaucer, and has many passages of splendid vividness and wonderful felicity. Warmly welcomed by his friends, Endymion was savagely assailed in Blackwood and the Quarterly. Meanwhile his small patrimony was rapidly shrinking, his health was broken by the exposure of a walking tour in Scotland and by assiduously nursing a dying brother; and from the winter of 181–19 a passionate love for Miss Fanny Brawne shook him terribly. His last volume, Lamia, Isabella, and other Poems, appeared in 1820, and contains two of his highest achievements, The Eve of St Agnes and Hyperion. Lamia, his last and strongest poem, according to Palgrave, is too Asiatic. Hyperion, with pictures of unsurpassed magnificence fails in epic unity and interest. Praise would be idle for the dignity and tenderness of the Odes, the pictorial splendour, the affluence of charm diffused throughout this little volume.
Long threatened with consumption Keats left England for Italy in September 1820, accompanied by his friend Severn, who nursed him devotedly until his death in Rome on 24 February 1821. He was buried in the old Protestant cemetery near the pyramid of Gaius Cestius.