Complete Poems and Selected Letters of John Keats

“No one else in English poetry, save Shakespeare, has in expression quite the fascinating felicity of Keats, his perfection of loveliness.”

John Keats was born in London on October 31, 1795, in living quarters connected with his maternal grandfather’s livery stable. He was the eldest of five children of Thomas and Frances Jennings Keats. His father was the chief hostler at the Swan and Hoop Inn, and the family prospered.

When Keats was eight, his father died in a riding accident, and the following year, his grandfather died. At fourteen, his mother succumbed to tuberculosis. By this time, however, Keats had received a liberal education at the progressive Clarke school in Enfield, where he studied English literature, modern languages, and Latin. He even began translating Virgil’s Aeneid at school. Charles Cowden Clarke, the headmaster’s son, remembered him as an outgoing youth who was passionate in his defense of friends. A fellow student recalled his fighting spirit, noting that Keats was not initially attached to books but preferred fighting. His brother George, however, spoke of Keats’s “nervous, morbid temperament” and his “bitter fits of hypochondriasm.” Keats himself described his mind as “the most discontented and restless one that ever was put into a body too small for it.”

In 1811, Keats left school to become a surgeon’s apprentice. During his five years of study, he completed his translation of the Aeneid and avidly read works by Ovid, Milton, and others. Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene decisively awakened his love of poetry and his own imaginative powers. Around 1814, Keats composed his first poem, “In Imitation of Spenser.” Despite being seen by medical colleagues as an “idle loafing fellow, always writing poetry,” Keats passed his apothecaries’ examination on July 25, 1816.

His poetic talent was recognized and encouraged by friends like Charles Cowden Clarke, who introduced him to Leigh Hunt. Hunt published Keats’s sonnet “O Solitude” in his magazine. In March 1817, Keats’s first volume of verse, Poems, was published, but it was a failure. That fall, Keats stayed with Benjamin Bailey at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he worked on his romantic allegory Endymion. He and Bailey discussed Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Milton, Dante, and Shakespeare. Back in London, Keats began writing his famous letters to friends and siblings, discussing aesthetics, the social role of poetry, and his own poetic mission. These letters reveal the rapid maturation of his artistic vision.

Despite the critical reaction to Endymion, which was published in April 1818 and attacked by Blackwood’s Magazine as the work of an “ignorant and unsettled pretender,” Keats was not destroyed. He entered a period of astonishing productivity. In the summer of 1818, he traveled to Scotland with his friend Charles Brown, vowing to “learn poetry here and shall henceforth write more than ever.” That fall, he began composing Hyperion, an imitation of Milton’s Paradise Lost. In December, following his brother Tom’s death from tuberculosis, Keats moved in with Charles Brown. There, he fell in love with Fanny Brawne, and they became betrothed a year later. In 1819, Keats produced “The Eve of St. Agnes,” “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” his major odes, Lamia, The Fall of Hyperion, and the verse tragedy Otho the Great (with Brown).

On February 3, 1820, Keats suffered a pulmonary hemorrhage, signaling an advanced stage of tuberculosis. He broke off his engagement and began what he called a “posthumous existence.” His poetic career effectively ended, though his volume Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, containing much of his most famous work, was published that July. Seeking a milder climate, Keats sailed for Italy in September with the painter Joseph Severn. They arrived in Rome on November 15. John Keats died in Rome on February 23, 1821, and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery. On his deathbed, he requested that his tombstone bear only the words: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”

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