John Keats (1995-1821)

John Keats died when he was only twenty-five, an age at which Wordsworth had still not begun to write the poems for which he is known today. The brevity and intensity of Keats's career are un­matched in English poetry. He achieved so much at such a young age that readers have always specu­lated about his potential had he lived to reach artis­tic maturity.

Keats came from very humble origins. His fa­ther, the keeper of a livery stable, was killed in a fall from a horse when Keats was eight; his mother died of tuberculosis when he was fourteen. Keats had been fortunate enough as a boy to attend an ex­cellent private school near London, where his teacher introduced him to poetry, music, and the theater. But soon after his mother died, his guard­ian, a hard-headed businessman, took Keats out of school and made him an apprentice to a surgeon and apothecary. In 1815 Keats continued his study of medicine more formally at Guy's Hospital in London. He qualified the next year to practice as an apothecary, but it was at this time that he decided, much to his guardian's displeasure, to devote his life to poetry.

Keats had become friends in London with Leigh Hunt, a well-known literary critic and political radical, who encouraged Keats to take himself seriously as a writer. Hunt also introduced him to other leading literary figures of the day, among whom were Hazlitt, Lamb, and Shelley. Hunt and his circle provided Keats with a friendly and en­couraging audience. But Keats had his difficulties at first. Some of his early poems lack the control and originality of expression that characterize his best verse. A long mythological poem entitled Endymion, published in 1818, was severely attacked by the reviewers, and at least some of their criti­cisms were justified. Keats himself realized that Endymion had its faults, that in writing it he was learning and experimenting—"fitting myself for verses fit to live," as he says in the preface. He was already at work on an even more ambitious project, an epic inspired by Milton's Paradise Lost, which he was to call Hyperion. Keats was driven by an in­creasingly independent sense of his own artistic potential, and by a burning ambition to measure himself against the greatest English poets: Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth.

The year 1818 was a difficult one for Keats. He was able to take the negative reviews of Endymion in his stride, but personal problems began to weigh heavily on him. As the eldest of four children, Keats felt a special responsibility and closeness to his two brothers and his sister. When his brother George, who had emigrated to America, ran into fi­nancial difficulties, Keats worked hard to earn extra money to help him. His younger brother Tom contracted tuberculosis, and Keats cared for him constantly, running the risk, as he well knew, of contracting the disease himself. In the autumn of 1818, Keats fell desperately in love with Fanny Brawne, a pretty, vivacious girl to whom he soon became engaged. But by this time Keats's own poor health, poverty, and relentless devotion to poetry made an immediate marriage impossible. The year came to a dismal end with Tom's death in De­cember.

In January 1819 Keats took a much-needed vaca­tion from London and spent a few days with some very good friends near the southern coast of Eng­land. As a relief from his taxing work on Hyperion, Keats set about writing a less ambitious, more romantic poem based on the legend of Saint Agnes' Eve (which falls on January 20). The result was one of Keats's greatest poems, The Eve of St. Agnes, and it marks the beginning of one of the most ex­traordinarily productive periods in all of English literature. In less than nine months, from January to September, Keats produced an astonishing se­quence of masterpieces: "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," six great odes, "Lamia," and a group of magnificent sonnets. During the last few months of 1819 Keats went back to Hyperion, this time with a new vision of what his most ambitious un­dertaking could become.

But Keats's career was to be cut tragically short just as he was beginning to realize his full potential. The first clear signs of the tuberculosis he had always feared became apparent in February 1820. He weakened rapidly during the spring and sum­mer. His close friend, the painter Joseph Severn, persuaded him to spend the fall and winter in Italy. But Keats had given up all hope of recovery. He died in Rome on February 23, 1821.

Keats's power as a poet comes from his re­markable ability to embody the complexity and concreteness of experience, and from the force and integrity of his character. He has always been known as a sensuous poet, and certainly his ability to appeal to the senses through language is virtually unrivaled. But there is much more to Keats than sensuousness. He is also a poet of ideas, of complicated and contradictory states of mind, and above all of deeply serious artistic enterprise —of what Matthew Arnold called "high and severe work." In contrast to most of his fellow Roman­tics, Keats sought to subordinate his own personal­ity in his poetry and to focus attention on the complex individuality of his subject. "A poet," he wrote, "is the most unpoetical of any thing in exis­tence. . . . The sun, the moon, the sea and men and women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute— the poet has none; no identity . . . ." He character­ized the ideal poetic attitude as the capacity for forgetting oneself in a concentration on, or iden­tification with, the subject of the poem. He called this attitude "Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." Yet despite his deemphasizing the direct expression of the artist's conscious needs and values, Keats's own personality emerges very clearly in his poems, and especially in his letters, which are perhaps the most interesting of any Eng­lish poet. In them we can see the deep connection between Keats's greatness as a poet and his greatness as a human being.