Author: Keats, John
Biography:
KEATS, John (1795-1821: ODNB)
Keats's short life was shadowed from early on by illness and financial insecurity. Little is known about the background of his father Thomas Keats but his mother Frances (Jennings) Keats came from a family with property. Thomas Keats died in 1804; his widow remarried; then her father John Jennings died in 1805 and the complications following a contested will meant that the four surviving Keats children depended upon a rather unsympathetic guardian for living expenses. Their mother herself died in 1810. John Keats had a solid early education at Clarke's School in Enfield, London. He was apprenticed to a surgeon in 1810, received formal medical training at Guy's hospital in 1815-16, and was licensed as an apothecary. He had been writing poetry and forming intense literary friendships, however--his first published work was a poem in Leigh Hunt's Examiner in 1816--and he deliberately gave up his prospects in medicine for a career as a writer. His early work came out of the circle of writers, artists, and musicians connected to Leigh Hunt (q.v.) and shared in the politically biased hostility that it excited. Nevertheless, Keats persevered and published three volumes of verse in four years, besides poems and reviews that he contributed to periodicals, and a collaborative play. He enjoyed the company of loyal friends within and outside the Hunt circle, travelling around England, Scotland, and Ireland with some of them. He became officially engaged to Fanny Brawne at the end of 1819. After nursing his brother Tom until he died in 1818, Keats himself became gravely ill. On the advice of his doctors, he went to Italy accompanied by the artist Joseph Severn, but died in Rome in February 1821. Despite favourable reviews of his final, great collection Lamia, and Other Poems, and a posthumous Paris edition of his poems together with those of Coleridge and Shelley (1829), his name might have faded away but for the work of Richard Monckton Milnes. In 1848 Milnes's Life, Letters, and Literary Remains, of John Keats (2 vols. 1848) introduced a wider general public to Keats's story, his engaging personality, and his brilliant correspondence. Even broader popular attention came with American collections, starting with reprints of the Paris edition and later a competing "Life" and collected works edited by James Russell Lowell (1854). (ODNB 4 July 2019)
Other Names:
- Keats