John Keats
Introduction:
“Do you not see how necessary a world of pains
and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”
John Keats, the
bright star, was the very personification of a young romantic. He was
everything the poet stereotype brings to your mind: boyish, indulgent, fragile,
star-crossed, and exceptionally talented.
And perhaps there’s a
close association because Keats is so widely regarded as one of the greatest
poets of all time. His work and, quite frankly, his tragic death, have
influenced so many of poetry’s powerhouse writers, like T.S. Eliot, William
Butler Yeats, Lord Alfred Tennyson, and as we learned in an earlier episode, Oscar
Wilde.
Life:
English Romantic poet John Keats was born on
October 31, 1795, in London. The oldest of four children, he lost both his
parents at a young age. His father, a livery-stable keeper, died when Keats was
eight; his mother died of tuberculosis six years later. After his mother’s
death, Keats’s maternal grandmother appointed two London merchants, Richard
Abbey and John Rowland Sandell, as guardians. Abbey, a prosperous tea broker,
assumed the bulk of this responsibility, while Sandell played only a minor
role. When Keats was fifteen, Abbey withdrew him from the Clarke School,
Enfield, to apprentice with an apothecary-surgeon and study medicine in a
London hospital. In 1816 Keats became a licensed apothecary, but he never
practiced his profession, deciding instead to write poetry.
Literary Career:
Around this time, Keats met Leigh Hunt, an
influential editor of the Examiner, who published his sonnets “On First Looking
into Chapman’s Homer” and “O Solitude.” Hunt also introduced Keats to a circle
of literary men, including the poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and William
Wordsworth. The group’s influence enabled Keats to see his first volume, Poems
by John Keats, published in 1817. Shelley, who was fond of Keats, had advised
him to develop a more substantial body of work before publishing it. Keats, who
was not as fond of Shelley, did not follow his advice. Endymion, a
four-thousand-line erotic/allegorical romance based on the Greek myth of the
same name, appeared the following year. Two of the most influential critical
magazines of the time, the Quarterly Review and Blackwood’s Magazine, attacked
the collection. Calling the romantic verse of Hunt’s literary circle “the
Cockney school of poetry,” Blackwood’s declared Endymion to be nonsense and
recommended that Keats give up poetry. Shelley, who privately disliked Endymion
but recognized Keats’s genius, wrote a more favorable review, but it was never
published. Shelley also exaggerated the effect that the criticism had on Keats,
attributing his declining health over the following years to a spirit broken by
the negative reviews.
“Give
me books, French wine, fruit, fine weather and a little music played out of
doors by somebody I do not know.”
In July 1820, he published his third and best
volume of poetry, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems. The
three title poems, dealing with mythical and legendary themes of ancient,
medieval, and Renaissance times, are rich in imagery and phrasing. The volume
also contains the unfinished “Hyperion,” and three poems considered among the
finest in the English language, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode on Melancholy,”
and “Ode to a Nightingale.” The book received enthusiastic praise from Hunt,
Shelley, Charles Lamb, and others, and in August, Frances Jeffrey, influential
editor of the Edinburgh Review, wrote a review praising both the new book and
Endymion.
The fragment “Hyperion” was considered by
Keats’s contemporaries to be his greatest achievement, but by that time he had
reached an advanced stage of his disease and was too ill to be encouraged. He
continued a correspondence with Fanny Brawne and—when he could no longer bear
to write to her directly—her mother, but his failing health and his literary
ambitions prevented their getting married. Under his doctor’s orders to seek a
warm climate for the winter, Keats went to Rome with his friend, the painter
Joseph Severn. He died there on February 23, 1821, at the age of twenty-five,
and was buried in the Protestant cemetery.
Literary Influence:
The time of his grandmother’s death also marked one of
Keats’s earliest surviving poems, “Imitation of Spenser.” It was inspired by
the work of 16th century London poet Edmund Spenser. John Keats continued
writing but his focus was on his studies. He studied medicine at Guy’s Hospital
in Central London and even received his apothecary’s license but he grew
increasingly depressed about his future.
“Nothing ever becomes real 'til it is
experienced.”
His brother George, once wrote that John feared “that
he should never be a poet and if he was not, he would destroy himself.” But for
Keats, luck was just around the corner. Through his old friend Charles Cowden
Clarke, Keats received his first big break. In May 1816, Clarke’s friend, poet
Leigh Hunt, published Keats’s sonnet “Solitude” in the liberal magazine, The
Examiner. That year, Keats decided to leave medicine and pursue poetry.
With his brother George’s move to America, Keats
decided to move to Wentworth Place, which was owned by Armitage Brown. It was
at Wentworth that he wrote some of his most famous works, “Ode to a
Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to Psyche,” “Ode on Melancholy,” and
“Ode to Indolence.”
“A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”
Wentworth held even more significance because it was
the place where Keats was introduced to Fanny Brawne, the woman who would later
become his fiancée, and admittedly, his obsession.
Before his brother Tom’s death, they had met when
Fanny was visiting Wentworth. Eventually, Fanny and her mother moved into
Wentworth. John and Fanny spent every day together and in June 1819, they
reached an informal agreement to be married. John continued to struggle
financially and felt he had little to offer her.
He wrote hundreds of letters to Fanny, often when they
were living next door to each other. His letters to her are some of the most
famous love letters ever written. In one, he says,
“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.”
Unfortunately, in parallel to his overwhelming love
affair with Fanny, Keats was also experiencing the all-too-familiar symptoms of
tuberculosis. His coughing and haemorrhaging got increasingly worse.
That fall, his doctors told him that his life depended
on a move to a warmer climate. He set off for Rome in November. On the ship to
Italy, he made his last revisions to “Bright Star.” He stopped writing to
Fanny, knowing he would never return to London.
In Rome, the medical treatment he received contributed
greatly to his suffering and rapid decline. He was bled and starved. He
requested pain medication, but was refused for fear of him committing suicide.
On February 24, 1821, at just 25 years old, John Keats
took his last labored breath. Before his death, he requested that his tombstone
not include a name, just a simple phrase:
“Here lies one whose
name was writ in water.”
Presentation on Romantic poets - Click here
Romantic Age: Click here
