Early life

John Keats was born on 31 October 1795 to Thomas and Frances Jennings Keats. He was the eldest of their four surviving children...George (1797—1841), Thomas (1799—1818), and Frances Mary "Fanny" (1803—89). A son was lost in infancy. John was born in central London, although there is no clear evidence of the exact location. His father was working as a barman at the Hoop and Swan pub when Keats was born, an establishment Thomas later managed and where the growing family would live for some years. It is now the "Keats at the Globe" pub, a few yards from modern day Moorgate station.

Keats was baptised at St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate and sent to a local dame school as an infant. In the summer of 1803, unable to attend Eton or Harrow because of expense, he was sent to board at the Clarke school in Enfield, close to his grandparents' house. The headmaster, John Clarke, was to become an important influence, mentor and friend, and introduced Keats to a great deal of Renaissance literature including Tasso, Spenser and Chapman's translations. In April 1804, only nine months after Keats had started at Enfield, his father died when he fractured his skull after falling from his horse on a return visit to the school. Thomas died intestate. Frances remarried two months afterwards, but left her new husband soon after and, with her four children, went to live with the children's grandmother, Alice Jennings, in the village of Edmonton. In March 1810, when Keats was 14, his mother died, leaving the children in the custody of their grandmother. Jennings appointed two guardians to take care of the children. That autumn, Keats was removed from Clarke's school to apprentice with Thomas Hammond ... a surgeon and apothecary. Charles Cowden Clarke, a close school friend of Keats, described this time as "the most placid time in [Keats's] painful life". He lodged with Hammond and slept in the attic above the surgery.

Early career

His first surviving poem...An Imitation of Spenser...comes in 1814, when Keats was nineteen. In 1815, Keats registered as a medical student at Guy's Hospital (now part of King's College London). Within a month of starting, he was accepted for a dressership position within the hospital ... a significant promotion with increased responsibility and workload, taking up precious writing time and increasing his ambivalence to working in medicine. Strongly drawn by an ambition inspired by fellow poets such as Leigh Hunt and Byron, but beleaguered by family financial crises that continued to the end of his life, he suffered periods of deep depression. His brother George wrote that John "feared that he should never be a poet, & if he was not he would destroy himself". In 1816, Keats received his apothecary's licence but before the end of the year he announced to his guardian that he had resolved to be a poet, not a surgeon.

Though he continued his work and training at Guy's, Keats was devoting increasing time to the study of literature. In May 1816, Leigh Hunt, greatly admired by Keats, agreed to publish the sonnet O Solitude in his magazine The Examiner, a leading liberal magazine of the day. It is the first appearance of Keats's poems in print and Charles Cowden Clarke refers to it as his friend's "red letter day", first proof that John's ambitions were not ridiculous. In the summer of that year he went down to the coastal town of Margate with Clarke to write. There he began Calidore and initiated the era of his great letter writing.

In October, Clarke personally introduced Keats to the influential Hunt, a close friend of Byron and Shelley. Five months later Poems, the first volume of Keats verse, was published. It was a critical failure but Hunt went on to publish the essay Three Young Poets (Shelley, Keats and Reynolds), along with the sonnet on Chapman's Homer, promising great things to come. He introduced Keats to many prominent men in his circle, including editor of The Times Thomas Barnes, writer Charles Lamb, conductor Vincent Novello and poet John Hamilton Reynolds, who would become a close friend. It was a decisive turning point for Keats. He was established in the public eye as a figure in, what Hunt termed, 'a new school of poetry'. At this time Keats writes to his friend Bailey "I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the imagination ... What imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth". This would eventually transmute into the concluding lines of Ode on a Grecian Urn " 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' — that is all / you know on earth, and all ye need to know".

Endymion, on its eventual publication, was also damned by the critics, giving rise to Byron's quip that Keats was ultimately "snuffed out by an article". One particularly harsh review by John Wilson Croker appeared in the April 1818 edition of The Quarterly Review:

[...] It is not, we say, that the author has not powers of language, rays of fancy, and gleams of genius — he has all these; but he is unhappily a disciple of the new school of what has been somewhere called 'Cockney Poetry'; which may be defined to consist of the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language [...] There is hardly a complete couplet enclosing a complete idea in the whole book. He wanders from one subject to another, from the association, not of ideas, but of sounds [...]"

John Gibson Lockhart wrote in Blackwoods Magazine

To witness the disease of any human understanding, however feeble, is distressing; but the spectacle of an able mind reduced to a state of insanity is, of course, ten times more afflicting. It is with such sorrow as this that we have contemplated the case of Mr John Keats. [...] He was bound apprentice some years ago to a worthy apothecary in town. But all has been undone by a sudden attack of the malady [...] For some time we were in hopes that he might get off with a violent fit or two; but of late the symptoms are terrible. The phrenzy of the "Poems" was bad enough in its way; but it did not alarm us half so seriously as the calm, settled, imperturbable drivelling idiocy of Endymion. [...] It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the [apothecary] shop Mr John, back to ‘plasters, pills, and ointment boxes’.

It was Lockhart at Blackwoods who had coined the defamatory term "the Cockney School" for Hunt and his circle, including William Hazlitt and, squarely, Keats. The dismissal was as much political as literary...aimed at upstart young writers deemed "uncouth" for their lack of education, non-formal rhyming and "low diction". They had not attended Eton, Harrow or Oxbridge colleges and they were not from the upper classes.

In bad health and unhappy with living in London, in April 1817 Keats moved with his brothers into rooms at 1 Well Walk. Both John and George nursed their brother Tom, who was suffering from tuberculosis. The house in Hampstead was close to Hunt and others from his circle, as well as the senior poet Coleridge who at the time lived in Highgate.

In June 1818, Keats began a walking journey around Scotland, Ireland and the Lake district with his friend Charles Armitage Brown. George and his wife Georgina accompanied them as far as Lancaster and then headed to Liverpool, from where the couple would emigrate to America. In July, while on the Isle of Mull for the walking tour, Keats caught a bad cold and "was too thin and fevered to proceed on the journey". On his return south, Keats continued to nurse Tom, exposing himself to the highly infectious disease. Some biographers suggest that this is when tuberculosis — his "family disease" — first takes hold. Tom Keats died on 1 December 1818.

Wentworth Place

John Keats moved to the newly built Wentworth Place, owned by his friend Charles Armitage Brown, also on the edge of Hampstead Heath, just a ten-minute walk south of his old home in Well Walk. This winter of 1818, though troubled, marks the beginning of Keats's annus mirabilis in which he wrote his most mature work. He had been greatly inspired by a series of recent lectures by Hazlitt on English poets and poetic identity. Keats composed five of his six great odes there in April and May and, although it is debated in which order they were written, Ode to Psyche starts the series. According to Brown, Ode to a Nightingale was composed under a mulberry tree in the garden.

Brown wrote,

In the spring of 1819 a nightingale had built her nest near my house. Keats felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song; and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast-table to the grass-plot under a plum-tree, where he sat for two or three hours. When he came into the house, I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his hand, and these he was quietly thrusting behind the books. On inquiry, I found those scraps, four or five in number, contained his poetic feelings on the song of our nightingale.

Dilke, co-owner of the house, strenuously denied the story, printed in Milnes' 1848 biography of Keats, dismissing it as "pure delusion".

In 1819, Keats wrote The Eve of St. Agnes, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Hyperion, Lamia and Otho (critically damned and not dramatised until 1950). The poems Fancy and Bards of passion and of mirth were inspired by the gardens. In September, very short of money, he approached his publishers with a new book of poems. They were unimpressed with the collection, finding the presented versions of Lamia confusing, and describing St Agnes as having a "sense of pettish disgust" and "a 'Don Juan' style of mingling up sentiment and sneering [...] a poem unfit for ladies". The final volume Keats lived to see...Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems...was eventually published in July 1820. It received greater acclaim than had Endymion or Poems, finding favourable notices in both The Examiner and Edinburgh Review.

Wentworth Place now houses the Keats House museum.

Fanny Brawne and Isabella Jones

Letters and poem drafts suggest that Keats first met Frances (Fanny) Brawne between September and November 1818. It is likely that the 18-year-old Brawne was visiting the Dilke family at Wentworth Place, before she lived there. Like Keats, Brawne was a Londoner — born in the hamlet of West End near Hampstead on 9 August 1800. Her grandfather had kept a London inn, as Keats's father had done, and had also lost several members of her family to tuberculosis. She shared her first name with both Keats's sister and mother. Fanny had a talent for dress-making, as well as for languages and repartee. She wrote, "I am not a great poetry reader" but that she had "a natural theatrical bent". During November 1818 an intimacy sprang up between Keats and Brawne but was very much shadowed by the impending death of Tom Keats, whom John was nursing.

That year, he met another woman for whom he felt a conflicted passion — Isabella Jones — "beautiful, talented, witty". He had met her in Hastings while on holiday in June. He "frequented her rooms" in the winter of 1818—19, and says in his letters to George that he "warmed with her" and "kissed her", though it is unclear how close they ultimately became. Biographers debate how influential she was to Keats's writing. Gittings maintained that The Eve of St Agnes and The Eve of St Mark were suggested by her, that the lyric Hush, Hush! ["o sweet Isabel"] was about her and the first version of Bright Star might well have been for her.

On 3 April 1819, Brawne and her widowed mother moved into the other half of Dilke's Wentworth Place and Keats and Brawne were able to see each other every day. Keats began to lend Brawne books, such as Dante's Inferno, and they would read together. He gave her the love sonnet — Bright Star (perhaps revised for her). It was a work in progress and he continued to work on the poem until the last months of his life. The poem came to be forever associated with their relationship. "It was", says Gittings, "a declaration of his love. [...] All his desires were concentrated on Fanny". From this point we have no documented mention of Isabella Jones again.

Sometime before the end of June, he at last arrived at some sort of understanding with Brawne. This was far from a formal engagement; he still had far too little to offer. Keats endured great conflict knowing his expectations as a struggling poet in increasingly hard financial straits would preclude marriage to Brawne. Their love remained unconsummated; jealousy for his unbound 'Star' began to gnaw at him. Darkness, disease and depression were close in around him and are reflected in poems of the time such as The Eve of St. Agnes and La Belle Dame sans Merci where love and death both stalk. "I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks" he wrote to her "your loveliness and the hour of my death". Keats writes to Brawne in another of his many hundreds of notes and letters:

My love has made me selfish. I cannot exist without you ... I am forgetful of every thing but seeing you again ... my Life seems to stop there ... I see no further. You have absorb'd me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving ... I should be exquisitely miserable without the hope of soon seeing you. [...] 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. (Letter, 13 October 1819).

Tuberculosis took hold and he was advised to move to a warmer country by his doctors. In September 1820 they had their final parting. Keats left for Rome and they both knew it was very likely they'd never see each other again. He died there five months later.

None of Brawne's letters to Keats survive, though we have his own letters. As the poet had requested, Brawne's were destroyed upon his death. She stayed in mourning for Keats for six years. In 1833, more than 12 years after his death, she married and went on to have three children, outliving Keats by more than 40 years.

Death

During 1820, Keats displayed increasingly serious symptoms of tuberculosis, to the extent that he suffered two lung haemorrhages in the first few days of February. He lost large amounts of blood and was bled further by the attending physician. Hunt nursed him in London for much of the summer. At the suggestion of his doctors, he agreed to move to Italy with his friend Joseph Severn. On 13 September, they left for Gravesend and four days later boarded the sailing brig The Maria Crowther. Keats wrote his final revisions of Bright Star aboard the ship. The journey was a minor catastrophe — storms broke out followed by a dead calm that slowed the ship’s progress. When it finally docked in Naples, the ship was held in quarantine for ten days because of a suspected outbreak of cholera in Britain. Keats reached Rome on November 14 by which time all hope of a warmer climate had evaporated.

On arrival in Italy, he moved into a villa on the Spanish Steps in Rome — today the Keats-Shelley Memorial House museum. Despite care from Severn and Dr. John Clark, his health rapidly deteriorated. The medical attention Keats received may have hastened his death. In November 1820, Clark declared that the source of his illness was "mental exertion" and that the source was largely situated in his stomach. Clark eventually diagnosed consumption (tuberculosis) and placed Keats on a starvation diet of an anchovy and a piece of bread a day — this was intended to reduce the blood flow to his stomach. He also bled the poet; a standard treatment of the day, but was likely a significant contributor to Keats's weakness.

Keats's friend Brown writes:

They could have used opium in small doses, and Keats had asked Severn to buy a bottle of opium when they were setting off on their voyage. What Severn didn't realise was that Keats saw it as a possible resource if he wanted to commit suicide. He tried to get the bottle from Severn on the voyage but Severn wouldn't let him have it. Then in Rome he tried again. [...] Severn was in such a quandary he didn't know what to do, so in the end he went to the doctor who took it away. As a result Keats went through dreadful agonies with nothing to ease the pain at all.

 again and again turning to the question of what it means to be a poet.

In a letter to George, he describes Negative capability as the poetic state in which we are "capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason. [...Being] content with half knowledge" where one trusts in the heart's perceptions. He writes later "I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of Imagination — What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth — whether it existed before or not — for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty."

In his letter to Richard Woodhouse, October 27, 1818, he famously describes the empty potential of the poetical character:

[It] has no self — it is every thing and nothing — It has no character — it enjoys light and shade; [...] What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion [chameleon] Poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation. A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity — he is continually in for — and filling some other Body — The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute — the poet has none; no identity — he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God's Creatures.  

On 21 September, Keats wrote to Reynolds

"How beautiful the season is now...How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it  ... I never lik'd the stubbled fields as much as now...Aye, better than the chilly green of spring. Somehow the stubble plain looks warm...in the same way as some pictures look warm...this struck me so much in my Sunday's walk that I composed upon it".

The final stanza of his last great ode: "To Autumn" runs:

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,-While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue; [...]

Long after his death, To Autumn would go on to become one of the most highly regarded poems in the English language.