John Keats (1795–1821) was an English Romantic poet who, in a career of barely six years, wrote some of the most loved poems in the language: Endymion, The Eve of St. Agnes, La Belle Dame sans Merci and the great odes of 1819. He died of tuberculosis in Rome at twenty-five, convinced that he had failed.
Works
Endymion, La Belle Dame sans Merci, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems
A stable keeper's son
Keats was born in London in 1795, the eldest son of a man who managed a livery stable. His father died after a fall from a horse when John was eight, and his mother of tuberculosis six years later. At school in Enfield he discovered poetry through the headmaster's son, Charles Cowden Clarke.
Apprenticed to a surgeon-apothecary, he went on to train at Guy's Hospital and qualified in 1816, but abandoned medicine for poetry. Through the editor Leigh Hunt he met Shelley and other writers, and published his first collection, Poems, in 1817.
Endymion and the critics
Endymion, a long poem on the love of a shepherd for the moon goddess, appeared in 1818 and was savaged by the Tory reviews, which mocked Keats as a vulgar member of the Cockney School. Shelley later claimed that the attacks had hastened his death, though Keats himself took them more calmly.
That year he nursed his younger brother Tom, who died of tuberculosis, and fell in love with his neighbour in Hampstead, Fanny Brawne. They became engaged, but his poverty and illness made marriage impossible.
The great year
In 1819, in a few months of extraordinary creativity, Keats wrote The Eve of St. Agnes, La Belle Dame sans Merci, the odes to a Nightingale, on a Grecian Urn, on Melancholy and To Autumn. They were published in July 1820 in Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems.
In February 1820 he coughed up blood and recognised his death warrant. Advised to spend the winter in a warm climate, he sailed for Italy with his friend the painter Joseph Severn and died in Rome in February 1821. He is buried in the Protestant Cemetery there.
Anecdotes
Writ in water
Keats asked that his gravestone should bear no name, only the words Here lies one whose name was writ in water. His friends added a bitter inscription about his enemies, and the stone in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome still carries no name.
The nightingale's garden
According to his friend Charles Brown, Keats wrote the Ode to a Nightingale in a single morning in May 1819, sitting under a plum tree in the garden of Wentworth Place, Hampstead, where a nightingale had built its nest. The house is now the Keats House museum.
Frequently asked questions
What are Keats's most famous poems?
The odes of 1819, To Autumn, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn and Ode on Melancholy, as well as Endymion, The Eve of St. Agnes and La Belle Dame sans Merci.
How old was Keats when he died?
Twenty-five. He died of tuberculosis in Rome on 23 February 1821.
Who was Fanny Brawne?
Keats's neighbour in Hampstead and his fiancée, to whom he wrote passionate letters in the last years of his life.