John Keats

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"Keats" redirects here. For other meanings, see Keats (disambiguation).

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John Keats (IPA: [ˈkiːts]; 31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821) was one of the principal poets of the English Romantic movement. During his short life, his work received constant critical attacks from the periodicals of the day, but his posthumous influence on poets such as Alfred Tennyson has been immense. Elaborate word choice and sensual imagery characterize Keats's poetry, including a series of odes that were his masterpieces and which remain among the most popular poems in English literature. Keats's letters, which expound on his theory of aethestics of "negative capability", were among the most celebrated by any men of letters.

Life

John Keats was born in 1795 at 85 Moorgate in London, where his father, Thomas Keats, was a hostler. The pub is now called "Keats The Grove", only a few yards from Moorgate station. Keats was baptised at St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate and lived happily for the first seven years of his life. The beginnings of his troubles occurred in 1804, when his father died from a fractured skull after falling from his horse. His mother, Frances Jennings Keats, remarried soon afterwards, but quickly left the new husband and moved herself and her four children (a son had died in infancy) to live with Keats' grandmother, Alice Jennings. There, Keats attended a school that first instilled in him a love of literature. In 1810, however, his mother died of tuberculosis, leaving him and his siblings in the custody of their grandmother.

Keats' grandmother appointed two guardians to take care of her new "charges", and these guardians removed Keats from his old school to become a surgeon's apprentice. This continued until 1814, when, after a fight with his master, he left his apprenticeship and became a student at King's College London. During that year, he devoted more and more of his time to the study of literature. Keats travelled to the Isle of Wight in the spring of 1819, where he spent a week. Later that year he stayed in Winchester. It was in Winchester that Keats wrote Isabella, St. Agnes' Eve and Lamia. Parts of Hyperion and the five-act poetic tragedy Otho The Great were also written in Winchester.

Following the death of his grandmother, he soon found his brother, Tom Keats, entrusted to his care. Tom was suffering, as his mother had, from tuberculosis. Finishing his epic poem "Endymion", Keats left to work in Scotland and Ireland with his friend Charles Brown. However, he too began to show signs of tuberculosis infection on that trip, and returned prematurely. When he did, he found that Tom's condition had deteriorated, and that Endymion had, as had Poems before it, been the target of much abuse from the critics. On 1 December 1818, Tom Keats died from his disease, and John Keats moved again, to live in Brown's house in Hampstead. There he lived next door to Fanny Brawne, where she had been staying with her mother. He then quickly fell in love with Fanny. However, it was overall an unhappy affair for the poet; Keats' ardour for her seemed to bring him more vexation than comfort. The later (posthumous) publication of their correspondence was to scandalise Victorian society. In the diary of Fanny Brawne was found only one sentence regarding the separation: "Mr. Keats has left Hampstead." Fanny's letters to Keats were, as the poet had requested, destroyed upon his death.

This relationship was cut short when, by 1820, Keats began showing worse signs of the disease that had plagued his family. On the suggestion of his doctors, he left the cold airs of London behind and moved to Italy with his friend Joseph Severn. Keats moved into a house on the Spanish Steps, in Rome, where despite attentive care from Severn and Dr. John Clark, the poet's health rapidly deteriorated. He died in 1821 and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome. His last request to be buried under a tomb stone reading, "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." His name was not to appear on the stone. Despite these requests, however, Severn and Brown also added the epithet: "This Grave contains all that was mortal, of a YOUNG ENGLISH POET, who on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his heart, at the Malicious Power of his enemies, desired these words to be Engraven on his Tomb Stone" along with the image of a lyre with broken strings.

Shelley and Byron erroneously blamed his death on an article published shortly before in the Quarterly Review, with a scathing attack on Keats's Endymion; "snuffed out by an article" was Byron's phrase. The offending article was long believed to have been written by William Gifford, though later shown to be the work of John Wilson Croker. Keats' death inspired Shelley to write the poem Adonais.

The largest collection of Keats's letters, manuscripts, and other papers is in the Houghton Library at Harvard University. Other collections of such material will be found at the British Library; Keats's House, Hampstead; Keats-Shelley Memorial House, Rome; and the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York.

Career and criticism

His introduction to the work of Edmund Spenser, particularly The Faerie Queene, was to prove a turning point in Keats' development as a poet; it was to inspire Keats to write his first poem, Imitation of Spenser. He befriended Leigh Hunt, a poet and editor who published his first poem in 1816. In 1817, Keats published his first volume of poetry entitled simply Poems. Keats' Poems was not well received, largely due to his connection with the controversial Hunt. Keats produced some of his finest poetry during the spring and summer of 1819; in fact, the period from September 1818 to September 1819 is often referred to among Keats scholars as the Great Year, or the Living Year, because it was during this period that he was most productive and that he wrote his most critically acclaimed works. Several major events have been noted as factors in this increased productivity: namely, the death of his brother Tom, the critical reviews of Endymion, and his meeting of Fanny Brawne. The famous odes he produced during the spring and summer of 1819 include: Ode to Psyche, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on Melancholy, and To Autumn.

Keats developed his poetic theories, chief among them Negative Capability and The Mansion of Many Apartments, in letters to friends and family. In particular, he stated he wished to be a "chameleon poet" and to resist the "egotistical sublime" of Wordsworth's writing. Oscar Wilde, the aestheticist non pareil was to later write: "[...] who but the supreme and perfect artist could have got from a mere colour a motive so full of marvel: and now I am half enamoured of the paper that touched his hand, and the ink that did his bidding, grown fond of the sweet comeliness of his charactery, for since my childhood I have loved none better than your marvellous kinsman, that godlike boy, the real Adonis of our age[...] In my heaven he walks eternally with Shakespeare and the Greeks."

William Butler Yeats was intrigued by the contrast between the "deliberate happiness" of Keats's poetry and the sadness that characterised his life. He wrote in Ego Dominus Tuus (1915):

I see a schoolboy when I think of him,

With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window,

For certainly he sank into his grave

His senses and his heart unsatisfied,

And made – being poor, ailing and ignorant,

Shut out from all the luxury of the world,

The coarse-bred son of a livery-stable keeper –

Luxuriant song.

Wallace Stevens described Keats as the "Secretary for Porcelain" in Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas.

Let the Secretary for Porcelain observe

That evil made magic, as in catastrophe,

If neatly glazed, becomes the same as the fruit

Of an emperor, the egg-plant of a prince.

The good is evil's last invention.

Lord Byron wrote (in a parody of the nursery rhyme 'Who killed Cock Robin?') on Keats' death in 1821:

Who kill'd John Keats?

"I," says the Quarterly,

So savage and Tartarly;

"'Twas one of my feats."

Who shot the arrow?

"The poet-priest Milman

(So ready to kill man),

Or Southey, or Barrow."

Popular references

• John Keats was mentioned in The Smiths song "Cemetery Gates": "Keats and Yeats are on your side \ while Wilde is on mine".
• Dan Simmons's science-fiction novels of the Hyperion Cantos feature two characters with the cloned body of John Keats, as well as his personality (reconstructed and programmed into an AI). Some of the main themes of these novels, as well as their names, draw upon John Keats's poems "Hyperion" and "Endymion".
• In pop singer Natasha Bedingfield's 2005 single "These Words", Keats is mentioned along with Byron and Shelley.
• A quote from Keats also appears in Phillip Pullman's novel The Subtle Knife, "...capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason -" (from a 21 Dec. 1817 letter by Keats on his theory of negative capability).
• Two films about Keats's life are in pre-production as of July 2007: a period drama about Keats's romance with Fanny Brawne titled Bright Star, directed by Jane Campion, and a mockumentary 'grunge' musical based on Keats's letters and set in Seattle at the beginning of the 1990s, titled 'Negative Capability', directed by Daniel Gildark.
• "Keats in Hampstead," a play, written and directed by James Veitch and based on the poet's time at Wentworth Place, premiered in the garden of Keats House in July 2007.
• A radio play "The Mask Of Death" on the final days of John Keats in Rome written by the Indian English poet Gopi Kottoor captures the last days of the young poet as revealed through his circle of friends (Severn), his poetry and letters.

Bibliography

References

• Goslee, Nancy (1985), Uriel's Eye: Miltonic Stationing and Statuary in Blake, Keats and Shelley, University of Alabama Press, ISBN 0817302433
• Jones, Michael (1984), "Twilight of the Gods: The Greeks in Schiller and Lukacs", Germanic Review 59 (2): 49-56.
• Lachman, Lilach (1988), "History and Temporalization of Space: Keats's Hyperion Poems.", Proceedings of the XII Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, edited by Roger Bauer and Douwe Fokkema (Munich, Germany): 159-164.
• Keats, John & Stillinger, Jack (1982), Complete Poems, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, ISBN 0674154304
• Wolfson, Susan J., The Questioning Presence., Ithaca, New York, ISBN 0801419093

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

John Keats

Wikisource has original works written by or about:

John Keats

• The Romantic Movement at johnkeats.org
• Complete Poetical Works
• RSS feed of the Complete Poetical Works
• Keats' Grave
• The Life of John Keats: a memoir by his friend Charles Armitage Brown
• Keats House
• The Keats-Shelley House in Rome
• Criticism of Keats’ La Belle Dame Sans Merci
• John-Keats.com
• Works by John Keats at Project Gutenberg
• Keats' Poetry and commentary at Oldpoetry
• Electronic Concordance to the standard edition of Keats's poetry
• Romantic Circles -- Excellent Editions & Articles on Keats and other Authors of the Romantic period

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