Keats Bio

John Keats (1795 - 1821)

John Keats was born in London on October 31, 1795 as the first child of Thomas Keats, a livery-stable keeper, and Frances (Jennings) Keats. Keats was educated at a private school run by the Reverend John Clarke, whose son -- Charles Cowden Clarke -- would become Keats's classmate and lifelong friend. Frances Keats died from tuberculosis in 1810 (her husband had died in a fall from a horse in 1804), and Keats was forced to leave school to begin an apprenticeship with a surgeon in Edmonton. Keats moved to London in 1815 to study medicine at St. Thomas's and Guy's Hospitals. He passed his examination as an apothecary in July of 1816 and worked as a medical practitioner in London until April of the next year. Keats's hobby of writing poetry, developed while a student, expanded into a more serious interest after Charles Clarke introduced him to the flamboyant poet/critic Leigh Hunt. Through Hunt, Keats met a variety of London artists and writers, including the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, the essayist Charles Lamb, and a fellow young poet by the name of Percy Shelley. Keats's first volume of poetry was published in March of 1817 and received little notice. Later that year, Keats attempted to write a massive epic poem in rhymed couplets on mythological themes. Endymion was ridiculed in the press immediately after its appearance, most notably in Blackwood's Magazine and the Quarterly Review (two of the most influential journals at the time). The effect of these viciously negative reviews upon the poet was greatly exaggerated by Shelley and others following the Keats's death; Keats himself was not happy with his early attempt at epic verse, and he had already entered a period of rapid development as a poet which would take him far beyond the style of Endymion. Virtually all of Keats's finest poems -- including "The Eve of St. Agnes" and the series of great odes -- were composed in 1819, Keats's annus mirabilis. The year 1819 was preceded by two important events in Keats's personal life. Keats met and fell in love with Fanny Brawne in the summer of 1818; the two were briefly engaged later that year, but the engagement was broken off and led to an exchange of tormented and impassioned letters. In December of 1818, Keats's brother Tom died of tuberculosis, and Keats himself began to show symptoms of the disease. His health gradually worsened in the early months of 1820. In September, Keats traveled traveled to Italy with a friend, the artist Joseph Severn, and he died in Rome on February 23, 1821, only four months after his twenty-fifth birthday.

www.john-keats.com is a wonderfully comprehensive site devoted to the life and work of Keats. It offers (among other things) the full text of the poems along with selections from his celebrated letters.