‘I have loved beauty in all things’

John Keats lived a short and often sad life. Born in London in 1795, he lost both his parents by the age of 14. He studied medicine, but abandoned the profession to focus on his driving passion, writing.

Romanticism – the appreciation of love, truth and beauty – was in full swing. Coleridge and Wordsworth were by then its elder statesmen; Keats met and admired both of them. But he had a rough ride with both critics and fellow poets. Several critics derided his work, and he didn’t get on with his fellow younger Romantics Byron and Shelley. Keats once said of Byron: “There is this great difference between us. He describes what he sees; I describe what I imagine. Mine is the hardest task.”

Keats’ most famous poems were all produced between 1817 and 1819. But at the same time he was nursing his brother Tom through ‘consumption’ (tuberculosis). Tom died in 1818, and Keats was infected by close contact. In 1820 he was advised to move to a warmer climate, and travelled to Rome. He never made a full recovery though, and died in February 1821 aged 25, having sold just 200 copies of his poetry volumes. He wrote shortly before his death: “I have left no immortal work behind me, nothing to make my friends proud of my memory, but I have lov’d the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember’d.”

The literary world (eventually) disagreed, and his work was later seen as near-perfect in its beauty and imagery. Even Byron and Shelley mourned him, and he had a profound influence on later poets including Tennyson,

Yeats, Eliot and Owen. The critic John Dennis wrote: “To Autumn, ripe with the glory of the season it describes, must ever have a place among the most precious gems of lyrical poetry.”