October 31, 2011 <Back to Index>
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John
Keats (31 October
1795 – 23 February 1821) was the last born of the English Romantic poets and, at 25, the
youngest to die. Along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe
Shelley,
he was one of the key figures in the second generation of the Romantic
movement, despite the fact that his work had been in publication for
only four years before his death. During
his life, his poems were not generally well received by critics;
however, his reputation grew and he held significant posthumous
influence on many later poets, including Alfred Tennyson and Wilfred Owen.
The poetry of Keats is characterised by sensual imagery, most notably
in the series of odes.
Today his poems and letters are considered as among the most popular
and analysed in English literature. 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 at first worked as
an ostler at
the stables attached to the Swan and Hoop inn, an establishment Thomas
later managed and where the growing family would live for some years.
The "Keats at the
Globe" pub now occupies the site, 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 John
Clarke's school in Enfield,
close to his grandparents' house. The headmaster's son, Charles Cowden
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.
Cowden Clarke, who remained a close friend of Keats, described this as
"the most placid time in [Keats's] painful life". Until 1813 he lodged with
Hammond and slept in the attic above the surgery. 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. 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. 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. 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. This
Grave / contains all that was Mortal / of a / Young English Poet / Who
/ on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his Heart / at the Malicious
Power of his Enemies / Desired / these Words to be / engraven on his
Tomb Stone: / Here
lies One / Whose Name was writ in Water There
is a discrepancy of one day between the official date of death and the
grave marking. Severn and Brown had added their lines to the stone in
protest at the critical reception of Keats's work. Hunt blamed his
death on the scathing attack of "Endymion" by the Quarterly Review.
Seven weeks after the funeral, Shelley memorialised Keats in his poem Adonaïs. Clark
saw to the planting daisies on the grave, saying that Keats would have
wished it. For public health reasons, the Italian health authorities
burned the furniture in Keats's room, scraped the walls, made new
windows, doors and flooring. In
2009, Marsh wrote, "In the old part of the graveyard, barely a field
when Keats was buried here, there are now umbrella pines, myrtle
shrubs, roses, and carpets of wild violets. [...] Shelley, one of
Keats’s most fervent champions, is also buried here" and Severn is
buried next the friend he nursed till the end. Nobody
who had known Keats ever wrote a full biography of Keats's life. Shortly after Keats's death in
1821, his publishers Taylor and Hessey announced they would speedily
publish The memoirs
and Remains of John Keats but
his friends refused to co-operate with the venture and so it was
scuppered. There were "biographical jottings of varying natures and
values" about
the poet who had become a figure within artistic circles –
including prolific notes, chapters and letters from his many artist and
writer friends. These, however, often give contradictory or heavily
biased accounts of events and were subject to quarrels and rifts.
His friends Brown, Severn, Dilke,
Shelley and Hunt, his guardian Richard Abbey, his publisher Taylor,
Fanny Brawne and many others issued posthumous commentary on Keats's
life. These early writings coloured all subsequent biography and have
become embedded into a body of Keats legend. Shelley promoted Keats as
someone whose achievement could not be separated from
agony, who was 'spiritualised' by his decline, and simply too
fine-tuned to endure the buffetings of the world. This is the
consumptive, suffering image popularly held today.
After much dithering, the first official biography was published in
1848 by Richard
Monckton Milnes (1809
– 1885). Landmark Keats biographers since, include Sidney Colvin (1845 – 1927), Robert Gittings (1911 – 1992), Walter Jackson
Bate (1918 –
1999) and Andrew Motion (b.
1952). |