Keats, John (1795-1821)

The poetry of English Romantic poet John Keats aims to find a balance between the beauty of the world and the inevitability of its passing. His work was much influenced by the early death of his brother, and by his own ill health and poverty. He died in 1821 of tuberculosis.

English poet. He produced work of the highest quality and promise, belonging to the artistic school of Romanticism, before dying at the age of 25. Poems (1817), Endymion (1818), the great odes (particularly ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ written in 1819, published in 1820), and the narratives ‘Isabella; or the Pot of Basil’ (1818), ‘Lamia’ (1819), and ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ (1820), show his lyrical richness and talent for drawing on both classical mythology and medieval lore.

Born in London, Keats studied at Guy's Hospital from 1815-17, but then abandoned medicine for poetry. Endymion was harshly reviewed by the Tory Blackwood's Magazine and Quarterly Review, largely because of Keats's friendship with the radical English writer Leigh Hunt (1784-1859). In 1819 he fell in love with Fanny Brawne (1802-1865). Suffering from tuberculosis, in September 1820, he sailed to Italy in an attempt to cure his worsening illness. He died in Rome, and was buried in the Protestant cemetery there.

Keats's poetry often deals with the relationship between love and death, beauty and decay. The odes reflect his feelings about the death of his brother and human mortality. ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is a symbol of beauty's power to surmount death, a theme which reappears in ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, where the figures on the vase are seen to epitomize an enduring truth, while ‘Ode to Autumn’ asserts the fulfilment of complete fruition and ripeness.

As a medical student Keats published the sonnet ‘O Solitude’, and from then onwards poetry dominated his life. Poems, containing the sonnet ‘On First Looking into Chapman's Homer’ and ‘Sleep and Poetry’, passed largely unnoticed. Undismayed, he began writing Endymion and was undeterred by the criticism of this work; he was able to reply: ‘I think I shall be among the English poets after my death’. While nursing his brother Tom, ill with tuberculosis, he wrote ‘Isabella’.

In ‘Hyperion’, the first version of which he had begun before the critics' adverse reception of Endymion, he had planned an epic similar to those of English poet John Milton, but discontinued it, depressed by the struggle to find his own unique poetic style and by Tom's death. ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ (1819) heralded an extraordinary outburst of creativity. He was in love with Fanny Brawne, but ill health and poverty seemed to prevent marriage. Nevertheless the year saw Keats produce ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, the sonnet ‘On a Dream’, and the great odes ‘On a Grecian Urn’, ‘To a Nightingale’, ‘To Autumn’, ‘On Melancholy’, and ‘To Psyche’. While ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, with its sensuous, pictorial language and romantic narrative, had immense influence on later 19th-century poetry, it is the odes which are Keats's most distinctive achievement.

To raise money for his brother George, who had emigrated to the USA, Keats wrote ‘Lamia’, an altogether more tightly disciplined work than Endymion. He also returned to ‘Hyperion’, now remodelling the poem as a personal vision, a study of the poet as creator, and wrote the great, mature ‘Ode to Autumn’. Troubled still by his unresolved relationship with Fanny Brawne, he became engaged to her, but his financial worries were pressing, and he suffered a haemorrhage early in 1820, correctly diagnosing this as a symptom of approaching death. Ironically, his volume Lamia, Isabella, Eve of St Agnes and Other Poems was well received in 1820.