john keats biography

(1795-1821)

Who Was John Keats?

John Keats devoted his short life to the perfection of poetry marked by vivid imagery, great sensuous appeal and an attempt to express a philosophy through classical legend. In 1818 he went on a walking tour in the Lake District. His exposure and overexertion on that trip brought on the first symptoms of the tuberculosis, which ended his life.

Early Years

A revered English poet whose short life spanned just 25 years, John Keats was born October 31, 1795, in London, England. He was the oldest of Thomas and Frances Keats’ four children. Keats lost his parents at an early age. He was eight years old when his father, a livery stable-keeper, was killed after being trampled by a horse.

His father's death had a profound effect on the young boy's life. In a more abstract sense, it shaped Keats' understanding for the human condition, both its suffering and its loss. This tragedy and others helped ground Keats' later poetry—one that found its beauty and grandeur from the human experience.

In a more mundane sense, Keats' father's death greatly disrupted the family's financial security. His mother, Frances, seemed to have launched a series of missteps and mistakes after her husband’s death; she quickly remarried and just as quickly lost a good portion of the family's wealth. After her second marriage fell apart, Frances left the family, leaving her children in the care of her mother.

She eventually returned to her children's life, but her life was in tatters. In early 1810, she died of tuberculosis.

During this period, Keats found solace and comfort in art and literature. At Enfield Academy, where he started shortly before his father's passing, Keats proved to be a voracious reader. He also became close to the school's headmaster, John Clarke, who served as a sort of a father figure to the orphaned student and encouraged Keats' interest in literature.

Back home, Keats' maternal grandmother turned over control of the family's finances, which was considerable at the time, to a London merchant named Richard Abbey. Overzealous in protecting the family's money, Abbey showed himself to be reluctant to let the Keats children spend much of it. He refused to be forthcoming about how much money the family actually had and in some cases was downright deceitful.

There is some debate as to whose decision it was to pull Keats out of Enfield, but in the fall of 1810, Keats left the school for studies to become a surgeon. He eventually studied medicine at a London hospital and became a licensed apothecary in 1816.

Early Poetry

But Keats' career in medicine never truly took off. Even as he studied medicine, Keats’ devotion to literature and the arts never ceased. Through his friend, Cowden Clarke, whose father was the headmaster at Enfield, Keats met publisher, Leigh Hunt of The Examiner .

Hunt's radicalism and biting pen had landed him in prison in 1813 for libeling Prince Regent. Hunt, though, had an eye for talent and was an early supporter of Keats poetry and became his first publisher. Through Hunt, Keats was introduced to a world of politics that was new to him and had greatly influenced what he put on the page. In honor of Hunt, Keats wrote the sonnet, "Written on the Day that Mr. Leigh Hunt Left Prison."

In addition to affirming Keats' standing as a poet, Hunt also introduced the young poet to a group of other English poets, including Percy Bysshe Shelley and Williams Wordsworth.

In 1817 Keats leveraged his new friendships to publish his first volume of poetry, Poems by John Keats . The following year, Keats' published "Endymion," a mammoth four-thousand line poem based on the Greek myth of the same name.

Keats had written the poem in the summer and fall of 1817, committing himself to at least 40 lines a day. He completed the work in November of that year and it was published in April 1818.

Keats' daring and bold style earned him nothing but criticism from two of England's more revered publications, Blackwood's Magazine and the Quarterly Review . The attacks were an extension of heavy criticism lobbed at Hunt and his cadre of young poets. The most damning of those pieces had come from Blackwood's, whose piece, "On the Cockney School of Poetry," shook Keats and made him nervous to publish "Endymion."

Keats' hesitation was warranted. Upon its publication the lengthy poem received a lashing from the more conventional poetry community. One critic called the work, the "imperturbable driveling idiocy of Endymion." Others found the four-book structure and its general flow hard to follow and confusing.

Recovering Poet

How much of an effect this criticism had on Keats is uncertain, but it is clear that he did take notice of it. But Shelley's later accounts of how the criticism destroyed the young poet and led to his declining health, however, have been refuted.

Keats in fact, had already moved beyond "Endymion" even before it was published. By the end of 1817, he was reexamining poetry's role in society. In lengthy letters to friends, Keats outlined his vision of a kind of poetry that drew its beauty from real world human experience rather than some mythical grandeur.

Keats was also formulating the thinking behind his most famous doctrine, Negative Capability , which is the idea that humans are capable of transcending intellectual or social constraints and far exceed, creatively or intellectually, what human nature is thought to allow.

In effect Keats was responding to his critics, and conventional thinking in general, which sought to squeeze the human experience into a closed system with tidy labels and rational relationships. Keats saw a world more chaotic, more creative than what others he felt, would permit.

The Mature Poet

In the summer of 1818, Keats took a walking tour in Northern England and Scotland. He returned home later that year to care for his brother, Tom, who'd fallen deeply ill with tuberculosis.

Keats, who around this time fell in love with a woman named Fanny Brawne, continued to write. He'd proven prolific for much of the past year. His work included his first Shakespearean sonnet, "When I have fears that I may cease to be," which was published in January 1818.

Two months later, Keats published "Isabella," a poem that tells the story of a woman who falls in love with a man beneath her social standing, instead of the man her family has chosen her to marry. The work was based on a story from Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio, and it's one Keats himself would grow to dislike.

His work also included the beautiful "To Autumn," a sensuous work published in 1820 that describes ripening fruit, sleepy workers, and a maturing sun. The poem, and others, demonstrated a style Keats himself had crafted all his own, one that was filled with more sensualities than any contemporary Romantic poetry.

Keats' writing also revolved around a poem he called "Hyperion," an ambitious Romantic piece inspired by Greek myth that told the story of the Titans' despondency after their losses to the Olympians.

But the death of Keats' brother halted his writing. He finally returned to the work in late 1819, rewriting his unfinished poem with a new title, "The Fall of Hyperion," which would go unpublished until more than three decades after Keats' death.

This, of course, speaks to the small audience for Keats' poetry during his lifetime. In all, the poet published three volumes of poetry during his life but managed to sell just a combined 200 copies of his work by the time of his death in 1821. His third and final volume of poetry, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems , was published in July 1820.

Final Years and Death

In 1819 Keats contracted tuberculosis. His health deteriorated quickly. Soon after his last volume of poetry was published, he ventured off to Italy with his close friend, the painter Joseph Severn, on the advice of his doctor, who had told him he needed to be in a warmer climate for the winter.

The trip marked the end of his romance with Brawne. His health issues and his own dreams of becoming a successful writer had stifled their chances of ever getting married.

Keats arrived in Rome in November of that year and for a brief time started to feel better. But within a month, he was back in bed, suffering from a high temperature. The last few months of his life proved particularly painful for the poet.

His doctor in Rome placed Keats on a strict diet that consisted of a single anchovy and a piece of bread per day in order to limit the flow of blood to the stomach. He also induced heavy bleeding, resulting in Keats suffering from both a lack of oxygen and a lack of food.

Keats' agony was so severe that at one point he pressed his doctor and asked him, "How long is this posthumous existence of mine to go on?"

Keats' death came on February 23, 1821. It's believed he was clutching the hand of his friend, Severn, at the time of his passing.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: John Keats
• Birth Year: 1795
• Birth date: October 31, 1795
• Birth City: London
• Birth Country: England
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: English Romantic lyric poet John Keats was dedicated to the perfection of poetry marked by vivid imagery that expressed a philosophy through classical legend.
• Fiction and Poetry
• Astrological Sign: Scorpio
• Death Year: 1821
• Death date: February 23, 1821
• Death City: Rome
• Death Country: Italy

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• Last Updated: November 12, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014
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Biography of John Keats, English Romantic Poet

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John Keats (October 31, 1795– February 23, 1821) was an English Romantic poet of the second generation, alongside Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. He is best known for his odes, including "Ode to a Grecian Urn," "Ode to a Nightingale," and his long form poem Endymion . His usage of sensual imagery and statements such as “beauty is truth and truth is beauty” made him a precursor of aestheticism. 

Fast Facts: John Keats

• Known For: Romantic poet known for his search for perfection in poetry and his use of vivid imagery. His poems are recognized as some of the best in the English language.
• Born​: October 31, 1795 in London, England
• Parents: Thomas Keats and Frances Jennings
• Died​: February 23, 1821 in Rome, Italy
• Education​: King's College, London
• Selected Works: “Sleep and Poetry” (1816), “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819), “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819 ), “Hyperion” (1818-19), Endymion (1818)
• Notable Quote​: "Beauty is truth, truth is beauty,'—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." 

John Keats was born in London on October 31, 1795. His parents were Thomas Keats, a hostler at the stables at the Swan and Hoop Inn, which he would later manage, and Frances Jennings. He had three younger siblings: George, Thomas, and Frances Mary, known as Fanny. His father died in April 1804 in a horse riding accident, without leaving a will.

In 1803, Keats was sent to John Clarke's school in Enfield, which was close to his grandparents’ house and had a curriculum that was more progressive and modern than what was found in similar institutions. John Clarke fostered his interest in classical studies and history. Charles Cowden Clarke, who was the headmaster’s son, became a mentor figure for Keats, and introduced him to Renaissance writers Torquato Tasso, Spenser, and the works of George Chapman. A temperamental boy, young Keats was both indolent and belligerent, but starting at age 13, he channeled his energies into the pursuit of academic excellence, to the point that, in midsummer 1809, he won his first academic prize.

When Keats was 14, his mother died of tuberculosis, and Richard Abbey and Jon Sandell were appointed as the children's guardians. That same year, Keats left John Clarke to become an apprentice to surgeon and apothecary Thomas Hammond, who was the doctor of his mother’s side of the family. He lived in the attic above Hammond’s practice until 1813.

Keats wrote his first poem, “An Imitation of Spenser,” in 1814, aged 19. After finishing his apprenticeship with Hammond, Keats enrolled as a medical student at Guy’s Hospital in October 1815. While there, he started assisting senior surgeons at the hospital during surgeries, which was a job of significant responsibility. His job was time consuming and it hindered his creative output, which caused significant distress. He had ambition as a poet, and he admired the likes of Leigh Hunt and Lord Byron.

He received his apothecary license in 1816, which allowed him to be a professional apothecary, physician, and surgeon, but instead, he announced to his guardian that he would pursue poetry. His first printed poem was the sonnet “O Solitude,” which appeared in Leigh Hunt’s magazine The Examiner. In the summer of 1816, while vacationing with Charles Cowden Clarke in the town of Margate, he started working on “Caligate.” Once that summer was over, he resumed his studies to become a member of the Royal College of Surgeons. 

Poems (1817)

Sleep and poetry.

What is more gentle than a wind in summer? What is more soothing than the pretty hummer That stays one moment in an open flower, And buzzes cheerily from bower to bower? What is more tranquil than a musk-rose blowing In a green island, far from all men's knowing? More healthful than the leafiness of dales? More secret than a nest of nightingales? More serene than Cordelia's countenance? More full of visions than a high romance? What, but thee Sleep? Soft closer of our eyes! Low murmurer of tender lullabies! Light hoverer around our happy pillows! Wreather of poppy buds, and weeping willows! Silent entangler of a beauty's tresses! Most happy listener! when the morning blesses Thee for enlivening all the cheerful eyes That glance so brightly at the new sun-rise(“Sleep and Poetry,” lines 1-18)

Thanks to Clarke, Keats met Leigh Hunt in October of 1816, who, in turn introduced him to Thomas Barnes, editor of the Times, conductor Thomas Novello, and the poet John Hamilton Reynolds. He published his first collection, Poems, which includes “Sleep and poetry” and “I stood Tiptoe,” but it was panned by the critics. Charles and James Ollier, the publishers, felt ashamed of it, and the collection aroused little interest. Keats promptly went to other publishers, Taylor and Hessey, who strongly supported his work and, one month after the publication of Poems , he already had an advance and a contract for a new book. Hessey also became a close friend of Keats. Through him and his partner, Keats met the Eton-educated lawyer Richard Woodhouse, a fervent admirer of Keats who would serve as his legal advisor. Woodhouse became an avid collector of Keats-related materials, known as Keatsiana, and his collection is, to this day, one of the most important sources of informations on Keats' work. The young poet also became part of William Hazlitt’s circle, which cemented his reputation as an exponent of a new school of poetry.

Upon formally leaving his hospital training in December 1816, Keats' health took a major hit. He left the damp rooms of London in favor of the village of Hampstead in April 1817 to live with his brothers, but both he and his brother George ended up taking care of their brother Tom, who had contracted tuberculosis. This new living situation brought him close to Samuel T. Coleridge, an elder poet of the first generation of Romantics, who lived in Highgate. On April 11, 1818, the two took a walk together on Hampstead Heath, where they talked about “nightingales, poetry, poetical sensation, and metaphysics.” 

In the Summer of 1818, Keats started touring Scotland, Ireland, and the Lake District, but by July of 1818, while on the Isle of Mull, he caught a terrible cold that debilitated him to the point that he had to return South. Keats' brother, Tom, died of Tuberculosis on December 1st, 1818.

A Great Year (1818-19)

Ode on a grecian urn.

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, Sylvan historian, who canst thus express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme: What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape Of deities or mortals, or of both, In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

“Ode on a Grecian Urn,” lines 1—10

Keats moved to Wentworth place, on the edge of Hampstead Heath, the property of his friend Charles Armitage Brown. This is the period when he wrote his most mature work: five out of his six great odes were composed in the Spring of 1819: "Ode to Psyche," "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode on Melancholy," "Ode on Indolence." In 1818, he also published Endymion, which, much like Poems, was not appreciated by critics. Harsh assessments include “imperturbable drivelling idiocy” by John Gibson Lockhart for The Quarterly Review, who also thought that Keats would have been better off resuming his career as an apothecary, deeming “to be a starved apothecary” a wiser thing than a starved poet. Lockhart was also the one who lumped together Hunt, Hazlitt, and Keats as member as “the Cockney School,” which was spiteful of both their poetic style and their lack of a traditional elite education that also signified belonging to the aristocracy or upper class.

At some point in 1819, Keats was so short on money that he considered becoming a journalist or a surgeon on a ship. In 1819, he also wrote "The Eve of St. Agnes," "La Belle Dame sans Merci," "Hyperion," "Lamia," and the play Otho the Great. He presented these poems to his publishers for consideration for a new book project, but they were unimpressed by them. They criticized "The Eve of St. Agnes" for its "sense of pettish disgust," while they considered "Don Juan" unfit for ladies. 

Rome (1820-21)

Over the course of the year 1820, Keats’ symptoms of tuberculosis got more and more serious. He coughed up blood twice in February of 1820 and then was bled by the attending physician. Leigh Hunt took care of him, but after the summer, Keats had to agree to move to Rome with his friend Joseph Severn. The voyage, via the ship Maria Crowther, was not smooth, as dead calm alternated with storms and, upon docking, they were quarantined due to a cholera outbreak in Britain. He arrived in Rome on November 14, even though by that time, he could no longer find the warmer climate that was recommended to him for his health. Upon getting to Rome, Keats also started having stomach problems on top of respiratory problems, and he was denied opium for pain relief, as it was thought he might use it as a quick way to commit suicide. Despite Severn’s nursing, Keats was in a constant state of agony to the point that upon waking up, he would cry because he was still alive.

Keats died in Rome on February 23, 1821. His remains rest in Rome’s Protestant cemetery. His tombstone bears the inscription “Here lies One whose Name was writ in Water.” Seven weeks after the funeral, Shelley wrote the elegy Adonais, which memorialized Keats. It contains 495 lines and 55 Spenserian stanzas. 

Bright Stars: Female Acquaintances

Bright star.

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art— Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night And watching, with eternal lids apart, Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite, The moving waters at their priestlike task Of pure ablution round earth's human shores, Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask Of snow upon the mountains and the moors— No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable, Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast, To feel for ever its soft fall and swell, Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

There were two important women in John Keats’ life. The first one was Isabella Jones, whom he met in 1817. Keats was both intellectually and sexually attracted to her, and wrote about frequenting “her rooms” in the winter of 1818-19 and about their physical relationship, saying that he “warmed with her” and “kissed her” in letters to his brother George. He then met Fanny Brawne in the fall of 1818. She had talent for dressmaking, languages, and a theatrical bent. By late fall 1818, their relationship had deepened, and, throughout the following year, Keats lent her books such as Dante’s Inferno. By the summer of 1819, they had an informal engagement, mainly due to Keats’ dire straits, and their relationship remained unconsummated. In the last months of their relationship, Keats’ love took a darker and melancholic turn, and in poems such as "La Belle Dame sans Merci" and "The Eve of St. Agnes," love is closely associated with death. They parted in September 1820 when Keats, due to his deteriorating health, was advised to move to warmer climates. He left for Rome knowing that death was near: he died five months later.

The famed sonnet "Bright Star" was first composed for Isabella Jones, but he gave it to Fanny Brawne after revising it.

Themes and Literary Style

Keats often juxtaposed the comic and the serious in poems that are not primarily funny. Much like his fellow Romantics, Keats struggled with the legacy of prominent poets before him. They retained an oppressive power that hindered the liberation of the imagination. Milton is the most notable case: Romantics both worshipped him and tried to distance themselves from him, and the same happened to Keats. His first Hyperion displayed Miltonic influences, which led him to discard it, and critics saw it as a poem “that might have been written by John Milton, but one that was unmistakably by no other than John Keats.” 

Poet William Butler Yeats , in the eloquent simplicities of Per Amica Silentia Lunae , saw Keats as having “been born with that thirst for luxury common to many at the outsetting of the Romantic Movement,” and thought therefore that the poet of To Autumn “but gave us his dream of luxury.”

Keats died young, aged 25, with only a three-year-long writing career. Nonetheless, he left a substantial body of work that makes him more than a “poet of promise.” His mystique was also heightened by his alleged humble origins, as he was presented as a lowlife and someone who received a sparse education. 

Shelley, in his preface to Adonais (1821), described Keats as "delicate," "fragile," and "blighted in the bud": "a pale flower by some sad maiden cherished ... The bloom, whose petals nipt before they blew / Died on the promise of the fruit," wrote Shelley. 

Keats himself underestimated his writerly ability. "I have left no immortal work behind me—nothing to make my friends proud of my memory—but I have lov'd the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember’d," he wrote to Fanny Brawne.

Richard Monckton Milnes published the first biography of Keats in 1848, which fully inserted him into the canon. The Encyclopaedia Britannica extolled the virtues of Keats in numerous instances: in 1880, Swinburne wrote in his entry on John Keats that "the Ode to a Nightingale, [is] one of the final masterpieces of human work in all time and for all ages," while the 1888 edition stated that, "Of these [odes] perhaps the two nearest to absolute perfection, to the triumphant achievement and accomplishment of the very utmost beauty possible to human words, may be that of to Autumn and that on a Grecian Urn." In the 20th century, Wilfred Owen, W.B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot were all inspired by Keats.

As far as other arts are concerned, given how sensual his writing was, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood admired him, and painters depicted scenes of Keats poems, such as "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," "The Eve of St. Agnes," and "Isabella."

• Bate, Walter Jackson.  John Keats . Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963.
• Bloom, Harold.  John Keats . Chelsea House, 2007.
• White, Robert S.  John Keats a Literary Life . Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
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English Romantic poet John Keats was born on October 31, 1795, in London. The oldest of four children, he lost both his parents at a young age. His father, a livery-stable keeper, died when Keats was eight; his mother died of tuberculosis six years later. After his mother’s death, Keats’s maternal grandmother appointed two London merchants, Richard Abbey and John Rowland Sandell, as guardians. Abbey, a prosperous tea broker, assumed the bulk of this responsibility, while Sandell played only a minor role. When Keats was fifteen, Abbey withdrew him from the Clarke School, Enfield, to apprentice with an apothecary-surgeon and study medicine in a London hospital. In 1816 Keats became a licensed apothecary, but he never practiced his profession, deciding instead to write poetry.

Around this time, Keats met Leigh Hunt, an influential editor of the Examiner , who published his sonnets “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” and “O Solitude.” Hunt also introduced Keats to a circle of literary men, including the poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Wordsworth . The group’s influence enabled Keats to see his first volume, Poems by John Keats , published in 1817. Shelley, who was fond of Keats, had advised him to develop a more substantial body of work before publishing it. Keats, who was not as fond of Shelley, did not follow his advice. Endymion , a four-thousand-line erotic/allegorical romance based on the Greek myth of the same name, appeared the following year. Two of the most influential critical magazines of the time, the Quarterly Review and Blackwood’s Magazine , attacked the collection. Calling the romantic verse of Hunt’s literary circle “the Cockney school of poetry,” Blackwood’s declared Endymion to be nonsense and recommended that Keats give up poetry. Shelley, who privately disliked Endymion but recognized Keats’s genius, wrote a more favorable review, but it was never published. Shelley also exaggerated the effect that the criticism had on Keats, attributing his declining health over the following years to a spirit broken by the negative reviews.

Keats spent the summer of 1818 on a walking tour in Northern England and Scotland, returning home to care for his brother, Tom, who suffered from tuberculosis. While nursing his brother, Keats met and fell in love with a woman named Fanny Brawne. Writing some of his finest poetry between 1818 and 1819, Keats mainly worked on “Hyperion,” a Miltonic blank-verse epic of the Greek creation myth. He stopped writing “Hyperion” upon the death of his brother, after completing only a small portion, but in late 1819 he returned to the piece and rewrote it as “The Fall of Hyperion” (unpublished until 1856). That same autumn Keats contracted tuberculosis, and by the following February he felt that death was already upon him, referring to the present as his “posthumous existence.”

In July 1820, he published his third and best volume of poetry, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems . The three title poems, dealing with mythical and legendary themes of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance times, are rich in imagery and phrasing. The volume also contains the unfinished “Hyperion,” and three poems considered among the finest in the English language, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode on Melancholy,” and “Ode to a Nightingale.” The book received enthusiastic praise from Hunt, Shelley, Charles Lamb, and others, and in August, Frances Jeffrey, influential editor of the Edinburgh Review , wrote a review praising both the new book and Endymion .

The fragment “Hyperion” was considered by Keats’s contemporaries to be his greatest achievement, but by that time he had reached an advanced stage of his disease and was too ill to be encouraged. He continued a correspondence with Fanny Brawne and—when he could no longer bear to write to her directly—her mother, but his failing health and his literary ambitions prevented their getting married. Under his doctor’s orders to seek a warm climate for the winter, Keats went to Rome with his friend, the painter Joseph Severn. He died there on February 23, 1821, at the age of twenty-five, and was buried in the Protestant cemetery.

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The Life and Works of John Keats

The bicentenary of Keats’s most productive years as a poet, and the period when he found inspiration, friendship and love, is an exciting opportunity to (re)discover and enjoy his works as well as engage with poetry and its ongoing relevance to us all today.

By City of London Corporation

This online exhibition has been created by Keats House, Hampstead for the #Keats200 bicentenary programme.

"Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!" (2021) by Elaine Duigenan Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

Introducing John Keats

John Keats was born and baptised in the City of London in 1795.  After education in Enfield and an apprenticeship in Edmonton, he trained to be a doctor at Guy’s Hospital before giving up a career in medicine to become a poet.

A thing of beauty is a joy forever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

From 'Endymion: A Poetic Romance', 1817

Keats House, Hampstead (2015) by Keats House Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

Keats moved to Hampstead, then a village outside of London, in 1817 and lived at Wentworth Place (now Keats House) from December 1818 to September 1820. While living there he mixed with a circle of friends who nurtured him and his work, met and fell in love with Fanny Brawne, and wrote most of the work for which he is now famous. After falling ill with consumption, he left England to go to Italy for his health but died there on 23 February 1821 at the age of just 25.

His gravestone in Rome bears the words ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water’, as he believed he had not achieved literary fame in his lifetime. Two hundred years later however, Keats is one of the best-known English Romantic poets and the works he wrote in the spring and summer of 1819 in particular, are still republished, studied, read and loved around the world.    Whether you already love his work or are new to Keats and his writing, we hope you find his genius and legacy living on through this exhibition.

John Clarke’s school, Enfield (About 1900) by E.G. Hill Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

John Keats was born in Moorgate, right on the edge of the expanding city of London. His father worked at an inn and his mother was the inn keeper’s daughter. John was the eldest child, followed by brothers George, Tom, and Edward (who died young), and finally a sister called Frances.       

Mapping John Keats's Life (2121) by Keats House Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

While the family weren’t wealthy, they could afford to send their sons to a good school. They chose John Clarke’s School in Enfield, which awarded prizes for good work instead of punishing children. This more liberal education encouraged Keats to change from a boy known for fighting to one who loved literature and poetry.  When he was eight, his father died in a riding accident while returning from visiting him at school. Within months his mother remarried, leaving her children with their grandparents. She returned five years later suffering from consumption, a common and fatal illness. Keats nursed his mother and began to study hard, believing this could help her. She died soon after leaving them as orphans.

The Keats children were given legal guardians by their grandmother but they were unable to access their inheritance. At the age of 14, Keats left school to train in medicine.  

Keats's cottage next to Thomas Hammond's house' (1925) by H. Cutner Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

Medical Training

Keats left school aged 14 to begin a career in medicine. He was apprenticed to Dr Thomas Hammond in Edmonton, who taught Keats to diagnose illnesses, prepare remedies and perform minor surgery.  

Two pages from John Keats’s medical notebook (1815) by John Keats Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

At the end of his apprenticeship, Keats returned to London to continue his medical training at Guy’s Hospital. Keats was a good student and was awarded the prestigious role of surgeon’s dresser, which involved assisting at amputations and dressing wounds. Witnessing operations performed before anaesthetics and antibiotics influenced his later writing on human suffering.

He passed his medical exams in 1816 at the age of 20, but was becoming increasingly drawn to a career as a poet. While studying at Guy’s he met the influential journalist Leigh Hunt, who was to become a great friend of Keats, and champion of his poetry. Keats’s first published  poem, ‘To Solitude’ appeared in Hunt’s journal The Examiner in May 1816, two months before passing his medical exams.       By the end of 1816 Keats could no longer balance both his work at the hospital and his writing. He chose poetry. While his guardians were appalled, Keats began to find support in a new circle of writers, artists and journalists living in Hampstead.   

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; let me thy vigils keep ’Mongst boughs pavillion’d, where the deer’s swift leap Startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell. But though I’ll gladly trace these scenes with thee, Yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind, Whose words are images of thoughts refin’d, Is my soul’s pleasure; and it sure must be Almost the highest bliss of human-kind, When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee.

‘To Solitude’, 1816

A view of the Vale of Health, Hampstead Heath (About 1800) by Francis John Sarjent Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

Wentworth Place, Hampstead

The Keats brothers, John, George and Tom, moved from Southwark to Hampstead in 1817, initially to benefit from its healthier environment. Situated eight miles outside London, it was then a small village, or more accurately, villages, on the edge of the Heath, which was already a popular leisure destination for Londoners. Keats was also attracted by the literary people who lived there, including Leigh Hunt who was living in the Vale of Health at that time.    

"Keats's Corner" Well Walk' (About 1875) by Frederick Cook Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

On 1 December 1818, John Keats’s brother Tom died of consumption at their lodgings in Well Walk, Hampstead.  John walked to Wentworth Place to tell his friends the Dilke family and Charles Brown the news and was invited by Brown to come and live with him at the house.  

‘Wentworth Place, Ham[p]stead’ (About 1890) by Fred Holland Day Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

Keats lived at Wentworth Place on and off until September 1820.  During this period, and inspired by his reading and surroundings, he produced many of the works for which he is now famous. He also found friendship with a creative, literary circle who championed his writing and encouraged him to work. Most significantly, while living in Hampstead he met and fell in love with Fanny Brawne, who lived at the house from April 1819 to December 1831.

Portrait miniature of Fanny Brawne (About 1833) by Anonymous Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

Fanny Brawne

In April 1819, the Dilke family moved out of Wentworth Place and rented their side of the house to Mrs Brawne and her three children, including the eldest daughter Fanny.

Engagement ring given to Fanny Brawne by John Keats (Late 18th, early 19th century?) Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

Fanny Brawne and Keats first met some time in late 1818. The Brawne family had rented Brown’s home for the summer while Keats and Brown were walking in Scotland. On Brown’s return, the family took another house nearby in Hampstead and continued to visit their friends at Wentworth Place.  After she moved back to Wentworth Place, and now separated only by a wall, the two fell deeply in love. It is not known when they exchanged rings, but we do know that Keats wrote 39 love letters to her between April 1819 and September 1820. 

The spring and summer of 1819 was a remarkably productive period in Keats’s life, inspired in large part by his love for Fanny Brawne. Even after he became seriously ill from February 1820, he continued to write letters to her despite being told by his doctors not to read or write poetry, in case it distressed him.

Fanny Brawne saw Keats for the last time on 13 September 1820, when he left for Rome. She continued to live in the house until a few years after her mother’s death in 1829.

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art – Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night, And watching, with eternal lids apart, Like nature’s patient, sleepless eremite, The moving waters at their priestlike task Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores, Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask Of snow upon the mountains and the moors; No – yet still stedfast, still unchangeable, Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast, To feel for ever its soft swell and fall, Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever – or else swoon to death.

‘Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art’, 1819

Keats’s Parlour (2015) by Keats House Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

The Poems of 1819

Keats wrote some of the finest poems in the English language in one phenomenally creative period from September 1818 to September 1819.  He was just 23. 

John Keats' (1819) by Charles Brown Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

Despite being hampered by family tragedy, continued money worries and literary criticism, Keats began and revised his epic poem ‘Hyperion’, composed two long narrative poems, sonnets, a ballad, a play and six exceptional odes.

Inspired by the loss of his brother Tom and the beauty, friendship and love he found in Hampstead, his poems of that year are both sad and uplifting at the same time, beautifully demonstrating how sorrow and happiness exist together. He was skilled enough to write about different subjects in different types of verse, yet his poems all show his love of nature and his belief in how powerful the human imagination is.  He seems to say that though everything in life fades, we still have beauty, an idea he represented in his poems through a malicious maiden or the melodic song of a nightingale.

‘Keats Listening to the Nightingale on Hampstead Heath’ (1849) by Joseph Severn Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

Critical Responses

Most of the poems Keats wrote between 1817 and 1819 were criticised by the conservative, literary establishment of the day. 

As a follower of Leigh Hunt, he was mockingly referred to as a ‘Cockney poet’, with the Tory paper the ‘Quarterly’ calling him

‘more unintelligible,… twice as diffuse and ten times more tiresome and absurd than his prototype’.

Keats only published three books of poetry during his lifetime. The publication of his first book, ‘Poems’ in 1817, mostly went unnoticed while reviews of ‘Endymion’ the following year, attacked both the poem itself and Keats personally. One critic questioned whether someone of his background should write about classical subjects and suggested that he should abandon all hope of being a poet.

The critical response to his last book , ‘Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems’ published in 1820, was more positive. The respected ‘Edinburgh Review’ praised the collection’s imaginative power and beauty of expression and Charles Lamb writing in the ‘New Times’, compared Keats favourably to Dante, Chaucer and Spenser.

The ‘Lamia’ volume contains many of the poems written during 1819 and is now seen as one of the strongest collections of poetry ever published. Sadly, Keats never knew the pleasure the poetry in this volume would later bring to so many people. The reviews at the time were not positive enough to make his work widely popular and fully understood by the public, and worsening symptoms of consumption meant that Keats wrote no more poetry after 1820.

Tuberculous lungs (1830s) by Robert Carswell Original Source: https://www.wellcomecollection.org

Keats and Consumption

In February 1820 Keats realised he had consumption, now known as tuberculosis or simply TB. There was no known cause, though many believed it was hereditary and that sensitive or creative people were more likely to be affected.  

‘The Maria Crowther, Sailing Brig’ (1820) by Joseph Severn Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

Keats probably contracted the illness in 1818 while nursing his brother Tom, but the disease lay dormant throughout 1819 allowing time for his most creative and brilliant writing. However, from February 1820 his health deteriorated, destroying his hopes for literary success. Keats was initially prescribed rest, a starvation diet and bloodletting, but this only made him weaker. He was also told to stop reading or writing poetry in case it over excited him. 

 As was common practice, Keats was advised to go abroad where a warmer climate could relieve his symptoms. On 17 September 1820, Keats sailed on the Maria Crowther to Italy where he intended to stay the winter. Joseph Severn, a friend and painter, accompanied Keats on his journey.

The ship made slow progress along the English Channel and the passengers had to endure being seasick as well as a violent storm. In the Mediterranean Keats suffered another haemorrhage, followed by a fever. On 21 October they finally arrived in the Bay of Naples but were forced to quarantine on board for two weeks before they could disembark. More than six weeks after leaving London they finally set foot in Italy on 31 October 1820. It was Keats’s 25th birthday. 

John Keats on his death-bed (1939) by Emery Walker after Joseph Severn Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

Death and Legacy

Keats died in Rome on 23 February 1821 aged just 25. He was buried four days later and the words ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water’ were later inscribed on his gravestone, as he believed he had failed in his ambition to be a great poet.

Keats published just three books of poetry in his lifetime but was also a prolific writer of letters, many of which survived providing a glimpse into the life and character of both him and the society he lived within.

When Keats died his writing was not well known beyond his circle of friends. It was through their love and dedication that many of his manuscripts survived.

I shall soon be laid in the quiet grave... O! I can feel the cold earth upon me - the daisies growing over me - O for this quiet - it will be my first -

Keats quoted in a letter from Joseph Severn to John Taylor, 6 March 1821.

After the first biography of Keats was published in 1848, the Pre-Raphaelite painters began to take an interest in his work. Keats’s sensuous imagery inspired them to paint scenes from his poems, bringing them to a wider audience.

By the 1880s Keats’s poetry was becoming increasingly popular and enthusiasts wanted to find his Hampstead home. A dedication plaque was added above the front door in 1896. When the house was threatened with demolition in 1920, the Keats Memorial House Fund raised enough money to save it. It opened to the public on 9 May 1925 and, today, Keats House is provided by the City of London Corporation as part of its contribution to the cultural life of London and the nation.

Despite changing tastes in literature over the last 200 years, Keats’s poetry is still fresh and meaningful. His life was short, yet he created some of the most enduring poems in the English language. We now celebrate him as one of the world’s finest poets.

From ‘Endymion: A Poetic Romance’, 1817

Keats's Desk (2015) by Keats House Original Source: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keats

We hope you enjoyed this exploration of John Keats's life.

If you'd like to learn more, visit Our City Together , where you will find in-depth articles covering specific periods in Keats's life, his letters, poetry and friends. 

Introducing Keats200

The Keats200 bicentenary is a celebration of Keats’s life, works and legacy, beginning in December 2018 through to February 2021 and beyond. It is led by three major partners – Keats House, Hampstead, The Keats Foundation and the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association – and is open to all individuals and organisations who have an interest in Keats or poetry.

One Keats200 project has been with photographer and artist, Elaine Duigenan. As Artist in Residence during 2020, Elaine has been inspired by the garden and collections at Keats House, Hampstead. She has created new artworks drawing on themes associated with Keats’s life and works. Two of these are featured in this display and Keats House would like to thank Elaine for permission to use these beautiful works of art to help engage us with the events of 200 years ago.

Today, Keats House is managed by the City of London Corporation and is a registered charity (1053381).

The Wren Window

City of london corporation, the defeat of the floating batteries at gibraltar, women of guildhall art gallery, sculpture in the city, 8th edition, billingsgate roman house and baths, faith in the city of london, marie duval's cartoons, john keats’s house, london and the transatlantic slave trade.

Biography Online

John Keats Biography

John Keats was an influential Romantic poet, who has become one of the most widely respected and loved British poets.

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

– John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn .

Short Bio John Keats

When he was young, Keats lost both his father (aged 8) and later his mother (aged 14). Orphaned at an early age, Keats and his siblings were looked after by their grandmother. It also placed the family in a difficult financial situation – Keats would struggle with money throughout his life.

Job as surgeon

Having finished school, Keats took an apprenticeship at Guy’s Hospital, London in October 1815. In the early nineteenth century, the job of a surgeon was very challenging; in the absence of anaesthetic and modern technology, there was only a limited amount doctors could do to ease the condition of patients. This suffering of patients and people was a theme Keats would later incorporate into his poetry.

Life as a poet

It was hoped that this medical training would give Keats a secure career and financial income. However, in 1816, despite making good progress, Keats told his guardian that he couldn’t become a surgeon and felt compelled to try and make a career as a poet. It was a decision that his guardians failed to understand because, at the time, there was little hope of making money from writing poetry.

However, Keats was introduced to some of the leading literary figures of the day, such as Leigh Hunt, Percy Shelley and poet John Hamilton Reynolds. This enabled him to publish his first collection of poems, but they were not a critical success and sold very few copies.

From 1817, John spent considerable time nursing his brother Tom, who was suffering from tuberculosis. In 1818, they went on a walking tour of northern England and Scotland. His brother’s conditions deteriorated, and, weakened by cold himself, it is likely that John Keats contracted the ‘family disease’ of tuberculosis.

Despite the difficulty of his nursing his dying brother and suffering a series of financial difficulties, Keats began his most prolific period of writing. Based on the edge of Hampstead Heath he composed five of his six odes.

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: ’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thine happiness,— That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees, In some melodious plot Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

First stanza of “Ode to a Nightingale”, May 1819

Around this time, he also met with the great poet William Wordsworth and Charles Lamb.

Publishing of Endymion

In 1818, his great work Endymion was published, however, many reviews were highly critical of Keat’s ‘immaturity’, it was labelled by some, including Byron as ‘Cockney Poetry’ – suggesting the poet used uncouth language. The edition sold very few copies, leaving both Keats and the publisher with a feeling of shame. Despite this critical failure, Keats gave an indication he strove only for genius. He did retain a faith in his poetry. As he writes:

“I was never afraid of failure; for I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.”

Letter to James Hessey (October 9, 1818)

Despite the support of some literary friends, this critical review left a profound mark on Keats. Throughout his short life, he felt he had been a failure, unable to leave any lasting mark on poetry. On his deathbed, he would later write scathing letters saying perhaps he should have sold out to mammon (money) rather than pursue the purity of his poetic journey. In his last letter to Shelley, he writes bitterly:

“…A modern work it is said must have a purpose, which may be the God – an artist must serve Mammon – he must have “self concentration” selfishness perhaps. .. ”(16 August 1820) [ link ]

In this last letter, Keats also describes his personal view:

“My imagination is a Monastery and I am its Monk.”

(16 August 1820) [ link ]

John Keats and Fanny Browne

In 1818, he first came into contact with Frances (Fanny) Brawne. She was 18 at the time, and a close friendship arose between them. However, the relationship was overshadowed by Keats’ nursing of his brother Tom; also the lack of finance meant that Keats had no realistic chance of being able to marry. They wrote many intimate letters, in which Keats often bared his soul and the depth of his feeling:

“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.”

The relationship was also cut short by the aggravation of Keat’s tuberculosis. By September 1820, Keats was very fragile from the effects of the disease. He was advised to move to warmer climes, and so with the help of friends, he was booked on a ship to Italy. However, after a rough sea journey, Keats’ health failed to improve; within a few months of arriving in Italy, he died from the disease that had claimed his mother and brother.

The last months were a period of great turmoil and difficulty. Often denied, even a small quantity of opium to ease the physical pain, Keats was racked with a feeling of insufficiency relating to the negative reviews his poetry had received.

Keats was buried in a cemetery in Rome, with the simple inscription on his tombstone ” Young English poet – Here lies one whose name was writ in water .”

Keats had died at the age of 25, after a period of just six years writing poetry. During his lifetime, he was a commercial and critical failure, selling only around 200 copies of books.

However, within a few years of his death, his reputation was to sharply rise – becoming one of Britain’s best-loved poets.

In particular, the Cambridge Apostles and Lord Tennyson (who became a popular Poet Laureate) admired the poetry of Keats and this helped make him known to more people. Pre-Raphaelite painters such as Millais and Rossetti were inspired by Keats’ imagery and used some of his poetic images in their paintings. By 1848, Richard Milnes had written the first biography of Keats.

In the Twentieth Century, many poets such as Wilfred Owen , W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot said Keats was a key literary inspiration.

The Twentieth Century also saw considerable interest in the letters of Keats. Keats devoted many letters to the subject of poetry – offering a unique discussion of the role and importance of poetry.

“Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.”

– Letter to John Hamilton Reynolds (February 3, 1818)

The poetry of Keats is wide-ranging and includes some of the most memorable lines in English poetry. His most famous poems such as the Odes are famous for their lyrical perfection in their poetic invocation of beauty. But, Keats, in poems such as Endymion , also wrote challenging poetry striving to challenge established currents of thought and question why things were.

“None can usurp this height… But those to whom the miseries of the world Are misery, and will not let them rest.”

Keats, “The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream”, Canto I, l. 147 (1819)

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “ Biography of John Keats ”, Oxford, UK www.biographyonline.net  Published  24th Jan 2010. Last updated 18 February 2018.

John Keats   – by W. Jackson Bate – winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography at Amazon

Related pages

External links

• Life and Works of John Keats
• Keats at British Library
• Poetry of Keats