John Keats

John Keats (London, 1795 – Rome, 1821) was one of the leading English poets of the Romantic movement, in the second generation alongside Byron and Shelley. He died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-five, less than four years after his first poems were published. During his lifetime his work drew little attention and was often attacked harshly; his reputation grew steadily after his death, and by the late nineteenth century he held a secure place in the English literary canon. He wrote in English, and his importance lies in combining sensory richness with intense feeling in a poetry of great precision.

He was born in 1795 in Moorgate, on the edge of London, into a modest family. His father, who worked with horses at a stable, died after a fall in 1804, and his mother later left her second husband. The children were raised largely by their grandmother in Enfield and Edmonton. Their mother died of tuberculosis in 1810, and the guardians appointed after her death took Keats out of school to train as a surgeon's apprentice. In those years he read the classics and the Elizabethan poets with great appetite. In 1815 he enrolled as a medical student at Guy's Hospital, but his interest in literature grew until he chose poetry above all else.

Reading Spenser, particularly The Faerie Queene, awakened his poetic vocation. His first surviving poem, written in imitation of Spenser, appeared in 1816 in Leigh Hunt's magazine The Examiner, which brought him into the circle of the younger Romantics. That same year saw the publication of his first volume, Poems (1817), which was coolly received, partly because of its publisher's poor reputation. Keats moved to a new publisher, and with Endymion (1818) he met harsh criticism. His life was shaped by the death of his brother Tom, also consumed by tuberculosis, in 1818, and by his love for Fanny Brawne, a relationship the illness eventually cut short.

His style pairs a notable sensory richness with a steady melancholy. In his odes, especially those of 1819, he explores beauty, transience and death through natural images and objects such as the Grecian urn and the nightingale. His longer poems, such as Endymion and Hyperion, show the influence of Milton and the classics. Keats worked in the shadow of the great poets before him, and his most personal verse came in the last months of his life, when illness pressed ever closer.

In 1820 he published his third book, which contained the great odes. That year he travelled to Rome with the painter Joseph Severn, at the invitation of Shelley, in the hope that the warmer climate would help him. He died there in February 1821. Shelley wrote the elegy Adonais in his memory, and the epitaph Keats wanted for his grave says that his name was writ in water.

His legacy is considerable. His odes and letters remain among the most read and studied texts in English literature, and his work influenced the Pre-Raphaelite movement and later poets. Jorge Luis Borges described his first encounter with Keats as an experience he felt for the rest of his life.