John Keats

NAME John Keats. He was born John Keats and never used a middle name.

WHAT FAMOUS FOR John Keats was one of the key figures of the second generation of English Romantic poets, alongside Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Despite dying at the age of 25, his sensory, emotionally charged poetry, including his famous odes, earned him a lasting place as one of the most celebrated poets in the English language.(2).

BIRTH John Keats was born at the Swan and Hoop inn at Moorgate, London, on October 31, 1795. The Globe pub now occupies the site, a few yards from the modern-day Moorgate station (2)

FAMILY BACKGROUND Keats's father, Thomas Keats, worked as a hostler at the stables attached to the Swan and Hoop Inn, an establishment he later came to manage, and where the growing family lived for several years. His mother was Frances Jennings, and John was the eldest of four surviving children, with two younger brothers, Tom and George, and a younger sister, Fanny. He remained close to all three siblings throughout his life (2), 

CHILDHOOD The first seven years of Keats's life were happy ones. His troubles began in 1803, when his father died after fracturing his skull in a fall from his horse. His mother remarried soon afterwards but quickly left her new husband, moving herself and her children to live with Keats's grandmother, Alice Jennings. 

When Keats was 14, his mother died of tuberculosis, leaving him and his siblings in his grandmother's custody. As a boy, Keats was not considered promising material: he was lazy, hot-tempered, and seemingly interested only in pranks and fighting (2)

EDUCATION Keats attended the liberal John Clarke's School in Enfield, Middlesex, while living with his grandmother, and it was here that he first developed a love of literature. He was introduced to the poetry of Edmund Spenser by the headmaster's son, Charles Cowden Clarke, and Spenser's "The Faerie Queene" proved a turning point in his development, inspiring his first poem, "Imitation of Spenser," in 1814 when he was 19. 

His grandmother's appointed guardians removed him from Clarke's school to apprentice him to a surgeon, and in 1810 the teenage Keats began an apprenticeship with Thomas Hammond, a doctor and family friend in Edmonton, Middlesex. He cancelled his fifth year as an apprentice to become a medical student at Guy's Hospital, registering there on October 1, 1815, and qualified as an apothecary the following year (3).

CAREER RECORD 1810 Started an apprenticeship with Thomas Hammond, a doctor and family friend in Edmonton, Middlesex. 

1815 Cancelled his fifth year as an apprentice doctor and became a medical student at Guy's Hospital in London. 

1816 Qualified as a licensed apothecary and surgeon with credit, but chose not to practice medicine professionally. 

1818 Devotedly nursed his younger brother Tom through terminal tuberculosis until Tom died on December 1, 1818. A legacy from his grandmother helped influence his decision to abandon medicine entirely and become a full-time poet

APPEARANCE Keats stood only about 5 feet tall, a fact about which he was notably self-conscious. He had an unusually small head, reddish-brown hair, and was generally considered handsome, with striking, expressive eyes that struck many of his contemporaries (2) 

Posthumous portrait by William Hilton, c. 1822

FASHION When feeling low and disinclined to write, Keats found that dressing smartly often lifted his mood, treating fine clothes almost as a personal remedy for melancholy. He also grew the nail of his little finger long, shaping it into the form of a pen nib  (2).

CHARACTER Contemporaries described Keats as kind, easygoing, generous, and warm-hearted, with a strong loyalty to his friends and family. Despite the hardships of his short life, he maintained a resilient and often playful disposition, tempered by bouts of melancholy that deepened as his health declined

SPEAKING VOICE Keats spoke with a clipped Cockney accent, a mark of his London upbringing that some more socially conservative critics used to mock him as a "Cockney poet." His accent was distinctive enough that friends nicknamed him "Junkets" in reference to how he pronounced his own name (2).

SENSE OF HUMOUR Keats was noted by friends as humorous and playful, delighting in wordplay, punning letters, and affectionate teasing of his circle. This lighter side coexisted with the more famously melancholic and intense tone of his mature poetry (2).

RELATIONSHIPS In 1818, Keats moved into Wentworth Place in Hampstead, a house newly built by his friend Charles Armitage Brown, taking the front parlour of Brown's half while a widow, Mrs. Brawne, and her children occupied the other half. There he fell deeply in love with the widow's eldest daughter, Fanny Brawne, then 18, and the couple became secretly engaged around Christmas 1818. 

Their feelings were not entirely equally matched at first, and Keats's declining health and lack of money repeatedly frustrated their plans to marry.

Fanny mourned him for years after his death, wearing his engagement ring until she married Louis Lindon in 1833. 

The posthumous publication of their love letters in the Victorian era scandalised polite society, which regarded such intimate correspondence as improper for public consumption (4). 

Watercolour of Fanny Brawne, 1833.

MONEY AND FAME Keats lived much of his adult life in financial difficulty, relying partly on a legacy from his grandmother and loans from friends after giving up his medical career, a decision that dismayed his guardians. His poetry received little commercial success or critical acclaim during his lifetime, and it was only after his death that his reputation grew, until by the end of the nineteenth century he was regarded as one of the most beloved poets in the English language (5)

FOOD AND DRINK  Keats had a genuine passion for claret, which he called "the only palate affair that I am at all sensual in," relishing how it went down "cool and feverless" on summer evenings. His relationship with food was more variable than simply "hearty," ranging from a fondness for game birds to periods of restricted or plain eating during illness. (6)

His frail constitution and eventual illness limited his appetite and stamina in his final years (2).

MUSIC AND ARTS Keats loved music and wrote admiringly of composers in his letters, telling a friend in 1816 that his heart had been "warm'd luxuriously by divine Mozart" and moved by the works of Thomas Arne. 

On his deathbed in Rome, his devoted friend Joseph Severn played sonatas by Haydn on a hired pianoforte to soothe the dying poet (2).

POETRY In 1814, at the tender age of 19, John Keats was already sufficiently smitten with poetry to write his first poem, “Imitation of Spenser,” inspired by Edmund Spenser’s "The Faerie Queene." This was a promising start, although being 19 and inspired by "The Faerie Queene" suggests he had rather more enthusiasm for poetry than most people of that age had for anything other than avoiding responsibility.

Keats made his first appearance in print on May 5, 1816, when his friend Leigh Hunt published the sonnet “O Solitude” in The Examiner. After that, the poems came tumbling out. "Endymion" appeared in 1818, his abandoned epic poem "Hyperion" was written between 1818 and 1819, and “Ode to a Nightingale” followed in May 1819. Keats was producing masterpieces at a rate that would make most writers look as if they were waiting for the furniture to arrive.

His final collection, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, was published in July 1820. It included “To Autumn,” now regarded as one of his finest poems and, according to a 1995 BBC poll, the sixth most popular poem ever written. This is a particularly impressive achievement for a poem whose principal subject is, essentially, fruit becoming ripe.

Keats's final poem was “Bright Star,” which he wrote on the blank pages of a volume of Shakespeare. He had a habit of scribbling poems on whatever scraps of paper came to hand and then hiding them around the house, apparently on the principle that poetry was best stored like emergency biscuits. After his death, a friend searched the house to recover these scattered verses, helping preserve the work of a poet whose career had lasted barely six years but whose influence has lasted considerably longer.

LITERATURE Keats developed a passion for reading in his early teenage years and rarely travelled without a copy of the complete works of Shakespeare. His own poetic career, though it lasted barely six years, produced some of the most celebrated works in English literature, including "Endymion," "Hyperion," "Ode to a Nightingale," and "To Autumn."  (2)

NATURE Keats found deep inspiration in the natural world, most famously composing "Ode to a Nightingale" in the garden at Wentworth Place beside a plum tree on a May evening in 1819, after hearing a nightingale that had nested nearby. "To Autumn" similarly grew out of a walk he took near Winchester on an autumn evening in 1819, capturing the season's quiet abundance (2).

Keats Listening to a Nightingale on Hampstead Heath by Joseph Severn, 1845

PETS Keats loved cats and showed a deep empathy for animals generally, once boasting of his capacity to imaginatively enter the mind of a sparrow hopping on his windowsill: "If a sparrow comes before my window, I take part in its existence & pick about the gravel" (2).

HOBBIES AND SPORTS Keats was an avid walker. In the summer of 1818, Keats undertook an ambitious walking tour of Scotland with his friend Charles Armitage Brown, covering around 600 miles in a month and often rising before dawn to complete 26 miles before noon. The tour included an arduous climb of Ben Nevis, which he likened to "mounting ten St Paul's without the convenience of a staircase," though a throat infection contracted on the Isle of Mull forced him to abandon his original plan of reaching John O'Groats (2).

SCIENCE AND MATHS Keats's scientific grounding came chiefly through his medical training. Although he abandoned the profession, this scientific training informed his precise sensory observations in poetry. His years at Guy's Hospital gave him a working knowledge of anatomy and disease that later allowed him to diagnose his own tuberculosis with unsettling accuracy (7)

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY Keats developed his own informal philosophy of poetry and suffering, articulated in letters describing concepts such as "negative capability," the poet's capacity to inhabit uncertainty and doubt without an irritable reaching after fact and reason. He also wrote of the world as a "vale of Soul-making," a personal theological reflection on how experience and hardship shape the human spirit (1).

POLITICS Keats was drawn to the liberal and reformist circle of Leigh Hunt, whose radical journal The Examiner was, in Keats's own estimation, a kind of Bible to him. This association with Hunt's politics contributed to the hostile reception of "Endymion" by conservative critics, who dismissed Keats as part of the disparaged "Cockney School" of poetry (8)

SCANDAL The posthumous publication of Keats's intimate love letters to Fanny Brawne scandalised Victorian society, which considered such candid personal correspondence unsuitable for public readership. 

During his lifetime, he was also the target of savage reviews branding him a vulgar "Cockney poet," with Lord Byron notoriously and cruelly dismissing him as showing "the drivelling idiotism of the mankin" (2)

MILITARY RECORD Keats had no military record and did not serve in the armed forces

MEDICAL CAREER Keats trained at Edmonton under Thomas Hammond before studying at Guy's Hospital in London. He passed his exams to become a licensed apothecary and surgeon in 1816. However, he gave up medicine in 1818 to dedicate himself to poetry full time, to the dismay of his guardians.

Image by Gemini

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS Keats nursed his younger brother Tom devotedly through his fatal battle with tuberculosis, which claimed Tom's life on December 1, 1818, and Keats's own health began to deteriorate markedly soon afterward. His grueling walking tour of Scotland in 1818, his tormented love for Fanny Brawne, and the wounding reviews of "Endymion" are all believed to have worsened his tubercular tendencies. 

He also suffered from syphilis, for which he was treated with mercury, a common but toxic remedy of the period. 

His medical training meant he recognised his condition immediately upon coughing arterial blood, reportedly declaring, "I know the colour of that blood! It is arterial blood. I cannot be deceived by that colour. That drop of blood is my death warrant. I must die" (9)

HOMES While living with his grandmother, Keats's home was on Lamb Street in Edmonton, Middlesex. In 1818 he moved to the newly built Wentworth Place in Hampstead, owned by his friend Charles Armitage Brown, taking the front parlour of Brown's half of the quiet white Regency building, where he lived for the next seventeen months. 

His final home, where he died, was 26 Piazza di Spagna in Rome, a pale yellow building run as a boarding house by a formidable landlady, Anna Angeletti (2).

26 Piazza di Spagna in Rome, 

TRAVEL Beyond his celebrated 1818 walking tour of Scotland, Keats's most significant journey came in his final months. In September 1820, hoping the warmer climate would help his failing health, he traveled to Italy aboard the ship Maria Crowther, arriving in Rome in November 1820, accompanied by his devoted friend, the portrait painter Joseph Severn  (10)

DEATH A month before his death, Keats suffered a violent relapse in Rome and attempted suicide, after which Severn devoted himself to reading aloud and playing soothing music at his bedside.  

John Keats died in Rome on February 23, 1821, clasping Joseph Severn's hand and reportedly saying, "I shall die easy. Don't be frightened. Thank God it has come." 

Surgeons who carried out an autopsy afterward found his lungs almost completely destroyed and were amazed he had survived as long as he had. 

Keats was buried at the Protestant Cemetery outside Rome, near the Porta San Paolo, with Fanny Brawne's love letters placed in his coffin, and per his final request his tombstone bears no name or date, only the words "Here lies One whose Name was writ in Water" (10)

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA Keats' life and poetry have inspired numerous adaptations, including the 2009 biographical drama film Bright Star directed by Jane Campion. Based on Andrew Motion's biography of the poet, it focuses on his relationship with Fanny Brawne, tracing their relationship up to his death in Rome. 

Kears also appears as a character in Dan Simmons' science fiction novel Hyperion and various historical fiction novels and plays.

His poetry continues to feature widely in television, film, and literary adaptations exploring the Romantic era. 

ACHIEVEMENTS Keats produced some of the most enduring masterworks of English poetry, including "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," and "To Autumn." Despite a writing career that effectively spanned only six years, he is universally recognized as one of the major poets of the Romantic movement.

Sources: (1) Wikipedia (2) Encyclopedia of Trivia (3) King's College London (4) Wikipedia (Fanny Brawne) (5) Britannica (6) The Project Gutenberg eBook of Letters of John Keats to His Family and Friends (7) PubMed: John Keats, poet, patient, physician (8) Wordsworth Grasmere (9) IFLScience (10) PBS NewsHour