On October 31st 1795, John Keats was born to Thomas Keats, head-stableman of the ‘Swan and Hoop’ and Frances Jennings, daughter of the owner of the inn. Thomas Keats died in 1804 of a fall from the horse he was riding. A year later, Frances Keats married William Rawlings, ‘a stable-keeper’ but the union did not last long. She died in 1810.
George (1797-1842), the second son, and Tom (1799-1819) shared with John Keats a profound affection with one another which arose in part from their attachment to their mother. Fanny (1803-89), the sole daughter and the one long-lived member of the family, married a Spanish man of letters, Valentin Llanos. Apparently, she shared but little of the temperament of her brothers.
Private School at Enfield
Keats inherited his consumptive tendencies from his mother and from his parents a consciousness of social class. It was intended that his brothers and he should be educated at Harrow, if funds permitted. The funds were inadequate but they allowed John Keats to be sent to John Clarke who ran at Enfield a private school in a fine Georgian mansion. Later, George and Tom followed him there.
His adolescence was characterised by quite a deep consciousness of the world. At that period, he found a sensitive guide, Charles Cowden Clarke (1787-1877), the son of the headmaster and a tutor in the school. As a young man, Keats’s senior by eight years, he possessed the gifts that seemed most desirable: an enthusiasm for books, an ‘excited’ interest in poetry and a political radicalism that included the reading of Leigh Hunt’s Examiner. Keats perused avidly all the books he borrowed from Clarke’s library. They included Mayor’s collection and his Universal History, Robertson’s histories of Scotland, America and Charles the Fifth, all Miss Edgeworth’s productions… Tooke’s Pantheon, Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary, which he appeared to ‘learn’ and spence’s Polymetis… the Aeneid … Burnet’s History of his Own Time and, of course, Leigh Hunt’s Examiner. In the words of B. Ifor Evans, “Here was an education fitting for a poet”.
For financial reasons again and an interminable Chancery suit, it was decided that Keats should abandon his studies and join a profession. Thus, in the summer of 1811, still under sixteen, John Keats was bound apprentice to Mr. Thomas Hammond, a surgeon and apothecary of Edmonton. The richest years of his youth (1811-1815) were spent among the bottles and drugs in Hammond’s surgery, in following the doctor on his rounds or holding the horse while patients were visited.
In the summer of 1815, he left Hammond to go to London as a student at Guy’s and Saint Thomas’s hospitals, and nine months later, he qualified for his apothecary’s certificate. Then, in the spring of 1817, he suddenly abandoned medicine for poetry. His poetical life came into being during these years of medical study, but it was “a thing apart, stolen pleasure”, writes B.Ifor Evans. He, nevertheless, completed his medical course.
Cowden Clarke introduced him to Spencer, through whose works he went “as a young horse would through a spring meadow-ramping”. But verse came haltingly. He persisted as he had done with his medical studies and the day arrived when “the black letters of the symbols of the letters on the page before him actually corresponded to the texture of his dreams”.
A Prophetic Power
One day, in the spring of 1816, Cowden Clarke, while visiting Leigh Hunt at Hampstead, took with him a few of Keats’s compositions. Among the early poems of Keats, Hunt noticed the presence of “exuberant specimens of genuine though young poetry”. He had the wisdom to select the best of Keats’s early poems and the generosity to print it in the issue of the Examiner dated May 5th 1816. Its first lines read:
O Solitude! If I must with thee dwell,
Let it not be among the jumbled heap
Of murky buildings, climb with me the steep-
Nature’s observatory- whence the dell,
Its flowery slopes, its river’s crystal swell,
May seem a span…
Hunt was the first real man of letters Keats had known and one whose generous affection and uncritical enthusiasm encouraged him to overleap his tentative approaches to verse. Hunt had recognized in Shelley and Keats “a prophetic power”. He judged them “with the eyes of posterity” as “poets of brilliant promise”. Friendship with Leigh Hunt provided Keats a new realisation of himself. Already he knew, within himself, that he was to be a poet in an age when “verse was to have a special glory”.
In the autumn of 1816, Mr. Alsager lent Charles Cowden Clarke a beautiful copy of the folio edition of Chapman’s translation of Homer. Clarke immediately summoned Keats to share the delight of exploring the volume. They read all through the night. Then Keats walked home. Cowden Clarke did not rise early the next morning but when he came down, he found on the breakfast table an envelope in Keats’s handwriting. Its sole content was a sonnet, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, Keats’s first significant poem. He left Guy’s Hospital in 1817 to dedicate himself exclusively to poetry. This year also marks the publication of his first book of poetry, Poems (1817).
He finished his second volume of poetry, Endymion: A Poetic Romance (1818), the mythological story of a mortal shepherd’s love for the immortal Goddess Diana. After completing this poem, Keats spent the summer of 1818 on a walking tour of the Lake District and Scotland.
On his return he was diagnosed to be in the early stages of tuberculosis, the disease that had killed his mother and would, in less than three years, claim his own life. In the same year, he watched his youngest brother, Tom, die of the same disease. Shaken but determined to continue writing, Keats moved to Wentworth Place in 1819. There he met his first love, Fanny Brawne.
Outpouring of Poetic Genius
In 1819 Keats wrote his finest poetry. In that single year, he wrote Lamia, The Eve of St Agnes, Ode on Indolence, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to Psyche, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on Melancholy and To Autumn as well as the Miltonic fragment Hyperion, which he would later rework as The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream. No other year in literary history has seen such an outpouring of poetic genius, particularly by such a young poet.
These poems were published in 1819 and on into 1820, the year that marks the extraordinary heights of Keats’s artistic career and “foretells the imminent end of his short but remarkable life”. Of the sickman’s account of his sufferings no record unfortunately remains. Severn suggests that he did not complain, but all that he endured comes through in his final words to him spoken on 23rd February 1821 when he knew he was dying, “Severn – I – lift me up – I am dying – I shall die easy – don’t be frightened – be firm and thank God it has come”. Severn lifted him up in his arms. ‘The phlegm seemed boiling in his throat’. He lived seven hours more, and then gradually he sank into death so quietly that Severn thought he was sleeping.
Three days later, he was buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. He travelled to Italy as “it had become obvious that another winter in England would prove fatal. As he was leaving England, he had the premonition that he would not return.
Shelley’s View
Keats’s reputation has had the strangest vicissitudes. As often happens with the death of a man of genius who has been the centre of his circle, there were numerous differences among his friends after his death, and so no memoir was written. But, if his friends did not voice their feelings, Shelley, who had been deeply affected by Keats’s demise, poured his emotions in Adonais. Despite its magnificence as a threnody based on the model of Moschus, it incorporates, quite innocently, an insidiously false impression of Keats’s personality. In Shelley’s view, this premature death was to be ascribed to the “savage” attacks of the reviews on a nature “not less delicate and fragile than it was beautiful”. Even after two centuries, with the whole evidence of Keats’s life and letters to weigh against it, this impression remains, and to many he still lingers in the imagination as A pale flower by some sad maiden cherished.
Relationship Between Life and Art
Keats gave the fullest expression of his genius in his poetry. Some of the main concerns of the poet are expressed in his letters to family and friends. It is in these letters, for example, that he tried to articulate his philosophies of life and art, asking and answering such questions as, what is the true character of a poet? What is the role of the poet in society? What is the relationship between life and art? And What is the function of the imagination? In a letter addressed to John Taylor on February 27 1818, he wrote, “…. That if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all…”
John Keats stands today among the great poets of the English language. The felicitousness of his phrasing, the sensuality of his diction and the richness of his imagery combined with his profound understanding of the relationship between life and art, make him a model to those who look to poetry for an aesthetic apprehension of human experience.
Engraved on his tombstone, as per his request, can be read the epitaph, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water”. In 1818, John Keats had written When I have fears. This sonnet expresses his anxiety that he might die before he could accomplish his life’s work. The question about what else he would have achieved had he not died so prematurely still haunts many people who appreciate his poetry.
Bibliography
- Abrams, M.H., ed. English Romantic Poets, New York: Oxford University Press, 1975.
- Evans, Ifor B. Great Lives, Readers Union Limited, London, 1941
- Gittings, Robert, Selected Poems and Letters of John Keats, London: Heinemann, 1966
- Bloom, Harold, The Visionary Company, Rev.ed. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1971.