John Keats (pronounced /ˈkiːts/; 31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821) was an

English poet who became one of the key poets of the English Romantic movement
during the early nineteenth century. During his very short life, his work received
constant critical attacks from periodicals of the day, but his posthumous influence
on poets such as Alfred Tennyson and Wilfred Owen has been immense. Elaborate
word choice and sensual imagery characterize Keats' 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 aesthetic theory of
"negative capability",[1] are among the most celebrated by any writer.

Life

John Keats was born in 1795 at 85 Moorgate in London, England, where his father,
Thomas Keats, was a hostler. The pub is now called 'Keats at the Globe', only a
few yards from Moorgate station. Keats was baptized 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 of a fractured skull after
falling from his horse. A year later, in 1805, Keats' grandfather died. 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 a love of literature in him.

In 1810 his mother died of tuberculosis, leaving him and his siblings in the custody
of their grandmother who appointed two guardians to take care of her new
"charges". They removed Keats from his old school to become a surgeon's
apprentice at Thomas Hammond's apothecary shop in Edmonton[2] (now part of the
London Borough of Enfield). This continued until 1814, when, after a fight with
his master, he left his apprenticeship and became a student at Guy's Hospital (now
part of King's College London, University of London). During that year, he
devoted more and more of his time to the study of literature. Keats traveled to the
Isle of Wight in the spring of 1819, where he spent a week. Later that year he
stayed in Winchester. It was here 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 walk in Scotland and Ireland with
his friend Charles Armitage 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 December 1, 1818,
Tom Keats died of his disease, and John Keats moved again, to live in Brown's
house in Hampstead, next to Hampstead Heath. There he lived next door to Fanny
Brawne, who had been staying there with her mother. He then quickly fell in love
with Fanny. However, it was overall an unhappy affair for the poet; Keats's 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. However, in 1937, a collection of 31 letters, written by
Fanny Brawne to Keats's sister, Frances, were published by Oxford University
Press. While these letters revealed the depth of Brawne's feelings toward Keats and
in many ways attempted to redeem her rather promiscuous reputation, it is arguable
whether or not they succeeded.

This relationship was cut short when, by 1820, Keats began showing serious signs
of tuberculosis, 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, which is now a museum that is
dedicated to his life and work, The Keats-Shelley House, on the Spanish Steps, in
Rome, where, despite attentive care from Severn and Dr. John Clark, the poet's
health rapidly deteriorated.

Portrait, Keats' grave in Rome

He died on February 23, 1821 and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome.
His last request was to be buried under a tombstone 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 epitaph: "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 blamed Keats' death on an article published shortly before in the Quarterly
Review, with a scathing attack on Keats' Endymion. 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's death inspired Shelley to write the poem
Adonais. Byron later composed a short poem on this theme using the phrase
"snuffed out by an article." However Byron, far less admiring of Keats's poetry
than Shelley and generally more cynical in nature, was here probably just as much
poking fun at Shelley's interpretation as he was having a dig at his old fencing
partners the critics. (see below, Byron's other less than serious poem on the same
subject).

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