John Keats

John Keats lived only twenty-five years and four months (1785-1821), yet his poetic achievement
was extraordinary. His literary career lasted a little more than five years (1814-1821), and three of
his great odes… “Ode to a Nightingale”, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, and “Ode on Melancholy”
…were written in one month. Most of his major poems were written between his twenty-third and
twenty-fourth years. In this brief period, he produced poems that rank him as one of the great
English poets. He also wrote letters which T.S. Eliot calls “the most notable and the important
ever written by any English poet.”
Keats was born in London to Thomas Keats and Frances Jennings. He was the eldest of
five children. Both of his parents were of poor and working-class background. He became orphan
at the age of eight and was brought up by his grandmother. He received his early education at
school in Enfield. He studied to become doctor at the age of fifteen but left his medical career to
follow his literary inclinations.
His work was not generally well perceived during his lifetime or immediately after his
death. Keats, dying, expected his poetry to be forgotten, as the epitaph he wrote for his tombstone
indicates: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” But the nineteenth century critics and
readers did come to appreciate him, though, for the most part, they had only a partial understanding
of his work. They saw Keats as a sensual poet; they focused on his vivid, concrete imagery; on his
portrayal of the physical and the passionate, and on his immersion of here and now.
With the twentieth century, the perception of Keats’ poetry expanded, he was and his
praised for his seriousness and thoughtfulness, for his dealing with difficult human conflicts and
artistic issues, and for his impassioned mental pursuit of the truth. Keats advocated living “the
ripest, fullest experience that one is capable of”; he believed that what determines truth is
experience (“axioms are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses”).
The publication of Keats’ letters, with their keen intellectual questioning and concern with
moral and artistic problems, contributed to this re-assessment. His letters throw light on his own
poetic practices and provide insight into his writing in general. Thus, even today his poems and
letters are some of the most popular and most analyzed in English Literature.