John Keats

• 1. Introduction

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  John Keats had been publishing poetry for less than four years when tuberculosis killed him in Rome at the age of 25. His last request was a tombstone bearing no name and no date, only the words, "Here lies One whose Name was writ in Water." He believed he had failed. In a letter to Fanny Brawne in February 1820 he wrote, "I have left no immortal work behind me - nothing to make my friends proud of my memory." In his lifetime, sales of his three volumes of poetry probably amounted to only 200 copies. Yet by the end of the century he sat in the canon of English literature. How does a young man who wrote seriously for only about six years, who was mocked as an uneducated apothecary, become the poet Tennyson would call the greatest of the 19th century? And how much of the Keats we think we know was painted in after he died?

• 2. An Apprentice In Medicine

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  At Guy's Hospital in October 1815, Keats was accepted within a month as a dresser, assisting surgeons during operations, the equivalent of a junior house surgeon today. This was a significant promotion that marked a distinct aptitude for medicine. He had already finished a five-year apprenticeship with Thomas Hammond, a surgeon and apothecary who was a neighbour and the family doctor, lodging in the attic above the surgery at 7 Church Street.

  Keats lodged near the hospital at 28 St Thomas's Street in Southwark with other medical students, including Henry Stephens, who later gained fame as an inventor and ink magnate. His long and expensive training led his family to assume he would pursue a lifelong career in medicine. At this point Keats seems to have had a genuine desire to become a doctor.

  The training began to swallow his writing time, and he grew ambivalent. 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, which made him eligible to practise as an apothecary, physician and surgeon. Before the end of that year he told his guardian he had resolved to be a poet, not a surgeon.

• 3. The Cockney School

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  John Gibson Lockhart, writing in Blackwood's Magazine, described Endymion as "imperturbable drivelling idiocy." With biting sarcasm he advised, "It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr John, back to plasters, pills, and ointment boxes." It was Lockhart who coined the defamatory term "the Cockney School" for Leigh Hunt and his circle, which included both Hazlitt and Keats.

  The dismissal was as much political as literary. It was aimed at upstart young writers deemed uncouth for their lack of education, their non-formal rhyming and their "low diction." They had not attended Eton, Harrow or Oxbridge, and they were not from the upper classes. A particularly harsh review of Endymion by John Wilson Croker appeared in the April 1818 edition of the Quarterly Review.

  Byron later quipped that Keats was "snuffed out by an article," suggesting he never truly got over the attacks. In the same years, Hunt scorned the Augustan school dominated by Pope and attacked the older Romantics Wordsworth and Coleridge as unsophisticated and crude. Keats echoed these sentiments and identified with a "new school" for a time. By his death he had been tainted by both old and new schools at once: the obscurity of the first-wave Romantics and the supposed affectation of Hunt's circle.

• 4. The Champions

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  Charles Cowden Clarke, the headmaster's son at John Clarke's school in Enfield, introduced the young Keats to Renaissance literature, including Tasso, Spenser, and Chapman's translations. When Leigh Hunt agreed in May 1816 to publish the sonnet "O Solitude" in his magazine The Examiner, Clarke called it his friend's red letter day, the first proof that Keats's ambitions were valid.

  Richard Woodhouse, the Eton-educated lawyer for Keats's publishers Taylor and Hessey, was convinced of Keats's genius even while noting he could be "wayward, trembling, easily daunted." Woodhouse began to collect Keatsiana, documenting as much as he could about the poetry. This archive survives as one of the main sources of information on Keats's work. Andrew Motion represents him as Boswell to Keats's Johnson, ceaselessly promoting his work and fighting his corner.

  Keats moved publishers after the critical failure of his first volume, Poems, which Clarke said "might have emerged in Timbuctoo." His original publishers, Charles and James Ollier, felt ashamed of it. Taylor and Hessey were enthusiastic instead, planning a new volume within a month and paying him an advance. Their lists came to include Coleridge, Hazlitt, Clare, Hogg, Carlyle and Charles Lamb. Generosity ran the other way too: Keats made large loans to friends such as the painter Benjamin Haydon and lent £700 to his brother George, leaving himself unable to cover the interest on his own debts.

• 5. Wentworth Place

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  The winter of 1818-19, though a difficult period, marked the beginning of Keats's annus mirabilis. He had moved to the newly built Wentworth Place, owned by his friend Charles Armitage Brown, on the edge of Hampstead Heath. He composed five of his six great odes there in April and May, and "Ode to Psyche" opened the published series.

  According to Brown, "Ode to a Nightingale" was written under a plum tree in the garden. Brown recalled that a nightingale had built her nest near the house in the spring of 1819, and that Keats "felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song." One morning the poet took his chair from the breakfast table to the grass-plot under the tree and sat for two or three hours. He came back inside with four or five scraps of paper, which he was quietly thrusting behind the books. Dilke, co-owner of the house, strenuously denied the story as "pure delusion."

  "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and "Ode on Melancholy" were inspired by sonnet forms and probably written after the nightingale ode. A line Keats had written to his friend Bailey, that "What imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth," was eventually transmuted into the closing lines of the urn ode: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." In 1819 he also wrote "The Eve of St. Agnes," "La Belle Dame sans Merci," "Hyperion," "Lamia" and a play, Otho the Great, which was critically damned and not performed until 1950. Wentworth Place now houses the Keats House museum.

• 6. Two Women

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  Keats befriended Isabella Jones in May 1817 while on holiday in the village of Bo Peep, near Hastings. She was beautiful, talented and widely read, financially secure though not of the top flight of society. He never hesitated to own his sexual attraction to her, writing to George that he "warmed with her" and "kissed her," though they seemed to circle each other rather than commit. The themes of "The Eve of St. Agnes" may well have been suggested by her, and the first version of "Bright Star" may originally have been for her.

  Frances "Fanny" Brawne, born in West End on the 9th of August 1800, shared her first name with both Keats's sister and his mother. On the 3rd of April 1819 she and her widowed mother moved into the other half of Wentworth Place, and Keats and Brawne could see each other every day. He lent her books such as Dante's Inferno and gave her the love sonnet "Bright Star" as a declaration. From this point there is no further documented mention of Isabella Jones.

  Their love remained unconsummated, and Keats knew his hard straits as a struggling poet would preclude marriage. "I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks," he wrote to her, "your loveliness, and the hour of my death." On the 13th of October 1819 he wrote, "I cannot exist without you... I could be martyr'd for my Religion - Love is my religion - I could die for that - I could die for you." When he left for Rome in September 1820 he felt unable to write to her or read her letters, though he corresponded with her mother. After the news of his death reached London, Brawne stayed in mourning for six years. In 1833 she married and had three children, outliving Keats by more than 40 years.

• 7. Posthumous Existence

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  On the 3rd of February 1820, on first coughing up blood, Keats said to Charles Armitage Brown, "I know the colour of that blood! It is arterial blood. I cannot be deceived in that colour. That drop of blood is my death warrant. I must die." His medical training had taught him exactly what he was seeing.

  Keats agreed to move to Italy with his friend Joseph Severn. On the 13th of September they left for Gravesend and four days later boarded the sailing brig Maria Crowther. Storms gave way to a dead calm, and when the ship reached Naples it was held in quarantine for ten days over a suspected cholera outbreak in Britain. Keats reached Rome on the 14th of November, by which time any hope of a warmer climate had disappeared. He moved into a villa on the Spanish Steps, today the Keats-Shelley Memorial House museum.

  The medical attention may have hastened his death. Dr. James Clark placed Keats on a starvation diet of an anchovy and a piece of bread a day, intended to reduce the blood flow to his stomach, and bled him repeatedly. Keats had asked Severn to buy a bottle of opium before the voyage, seeing it as a possible means of suicide. Severn, in a quandary, eventually handed it to the doctor, who took it away. As a result Keats went through dreadful agonies with nothing to ease the pain. He repeatedly demanded, "How long is this posthumous existence of mine to go on?"

  In his last letter, written on the 30th of November 1820 to Brown, Keats described "an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence." Severn nursed him devotedly and observed that Keats would sometimes cry upon waking to find himself still alive. At the end Keats told him, "lift me up, I am dying, I shall die easy; don't be frightened, be firm, and thank God it has come." He died on the 23rd of February 1821 and was buried in the city's Protestant Cemetery, where Joseph Severn is buried next to him and the ashes of Shelley also lie.

• 8. The Legend And The Letters

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  None of Keats's biographers had known him. Shortly after his death his publishers announced The memoirs and remains of John Keats, but his friends refused to cooperate and argued so bitterly that the project was abandoned. Leigh Hunt's account of 1828 gave the first biographical sketch, strongly emphasising Keats's supposedly humble origins, a misconception that still continues. Brown, Severn, Dilke, Shelley, Richard Abbey, Taylor and Fanny Brawne all issued posthumous commentary, and their early writings became embedded in a body of Keats legend.

  Shelley promoted Keats as someone whose achievement could not be separated from agony, too fine-tuned to endure the harshness of life. Seven weeks after the funeral he wrote the elegy Adonais, declaring the early death a personal and public tragedy. The idealised image of the heroic poet who battled poverty was inflated by the late arrival of an authoritative biography, which Richard Monckton Milnes did not publish until 1848. Most surviving portraits were painted after his death, and those who knew him held they failed to capture his quality.

  The letters tell a different story. Disregarded by 19th-century critics as distractions, they came to be almost as admired as the poetry. T. S. Eliot called them "certainly the most notable and most important ever written by any English poet." In them Keats coined the term negative capability, the state of being "capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason." He described the Chameleon Poet, who "has no Identity" and is "continually in for - and filling some other Body." Writing to George, he explored the world as "the vale of Soul-making."

  In September 1819 Keats wrote to Reynolds about a Sunday walk: "I never lik'd the stubbled fields as much as now... Somehow the stubble plain looks warm." That walk became "To Autumn," of which Bate wrote, "Each generation has found it one of the most nearly perfect poems in English." A sculpture of the 21-year-old Keats, by Martin Jennings, was unveiled in Moorgate on the 31st of October 2024, the 229th anniversary of his birth.