John Keats’s life, tragically curtailed when he died in Rome at age twenty‐five, has spellbound his readers almost as much as his poetry has. Born in October 1795 (there is some debate as to whether he was born on 29 or 31 October), he was the son of the manager of a livery stable. His father died in 1804, after which his mother (née Frances Rawlings) swiftly remarried, prompting some familial consternation, before she died in 1810. Keats attended John Clarke’s Enfield school from 1803, befriending Charles Cowden Clarke and J. H. Reynolds, who encouraged him in his literary efforts throughout his life. Apprenticed to a surgeon in 1811, Keats completed his training at Guy’s Hospital in 1816, and passed his exams to become a licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries. Despite this achievement, which would have allowed Keats to practise as a surgeon, apothecary, or physician, he decided to dedicate his life to poetry rather than medicine, though his poetry retains some traces of his professional training.
Meeting Leigh Hunt in October 1816 was a vital stage of Keats’s poetic development. Drawn into Hunt’s circle, Keats met painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Horace Smith, amongst others, and the heady political and literary conversations sparked him into creating increasingly ambitious poetry. C. and J. Ollier, Shelley’s publishers, brought out his first volume, Poems, in 1817, but they quickly dropped him from their list. This misfortune did not leave Keats in the wilderness, as Taylor and Hessey elected to become his publishers within a month. Critics, notably Blackwood’s, began to abuse his poetry, and such ignominy continued after the publication of his long romance, Endymion, in 1818; Shelley would explicitly blame the Quarterly Review for Keats’s early death in Adonais. Yet Keats was seemingly unperturbed by such criticism, claiming instead to write for posterity rather than to obsess over his reception in his own era. His domestic life was proving increasingly difficult. His brother George, who had been a pragmatic source of strength for Keats, moved with his new bride, Georgiana, to America, and his other brother Tom became desperately ill with tuberculosis and died on 1 December 1818: Keats nursed him for the final months of his life. However, Keats also met the love of his life, Fanny Brawne, in November 1818, and his remarkable letters to her, to George and Georgiana Keats, and many other correspondents, testify to Keats’s intellectual vigour despite his worsening health. Remaining formidably productive, between 1818 and 1820, Keats wrote The Eve of St. Agnes, The Eve of St. Mark, Hyperion, Lamia, Isabella, and his Odes, amongst many other poems. By July 1820, Keats was ordered by his doctor to go to Italy; despite the attention of his companion, the painter Joseph Severn, his tuberculosis made him gravely ill, and he died on 23 February 1821. His reputation steadily grew until, by the late nineteenth century, the general public began to recognize his rightful place amongst the great poets. As Shelley wrote in his elegy for Keats, he became part of ‘the abode where the Eternal are’.
Kelvin Everest, ‘Keats, John (1795–1821)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2006 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/15229, accessed 7 September 2015]; John Keats (1795–1821): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/15229; Duncan Wu, ‘John Keats (1795–1821)’, in Romanticism: An Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu, 4th edn (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2012), pp. 1384–96.