Great Britons
Richard Ginger on poet John Keats
GIVEN the extraordinary power and longevity of Keats’ work, it is hard to believe that he lived for just a quarter of a century. Still, as 2021 marks the 200th anniversary of his death, now is an apt time to reflect on that life, brief but everlasting.
Born on 31 October 1795 in London, John Keats was the eldest of Thomas and Frances Jennings Keats’ five children. The family’s social standing has been a subject of some debate. Some accounts of Keats’ humble origins tell of an impoverished birth in the stables of The Swan and Hoop inn near Finsbury Circus (now the site of a pub called The Globe, to the west of Liverpool Street station).
Keats’ father managed the stables for his father-in-law, and later went on to take over and expand the thriving business, which allowed the family to move into their own home. John and his two younger brothers, George and Tom, were then enrolled into the Enfield school run by the headmaster, John Clarke.
The liberal-minded Clarke was to be an early influence on Keats, encouraging his love of reading, particularly history and the classics. At school, Keats made many friends, among them Charles Cowden Clarke, the son of the headmaster, who would be a lifelong friend.
While little is known of Keats’ younger life, he appears to have been a popular and gregarious member of the school community, far removed from some later characterisations of him as the epitome of the doomed and overwrought Romantic poet. Recalling his impressions of Keats during his school days, Cowden Clarke wrote: “He was not merely the ‘favourite of all’, like a pet prize-fighter, for his terrier courage; but his high-mindedness, his utter unconsciousness of a mean motive, his placability, his generosity, wrought so general a feeling in his behalf, that I never heard a word of disapproval from any one, superior or equal, who had known him.”
However, within less than a year of his arrival at school, at the age of just eight, a tragic accident was to profoundly reshape the course and tone of Keats’ life.
On 16 April 1804, riding home from work, his father fell from his horse, cracked his skull and died the next day. This sudden loss had a devastating effect on Keats’ mother, Frances, who, within two months of her husband’s death, had remarried and moved her children into her own mother’s home. But, the union proved short-lived and she soon joined her children at their grandmother’s, leaving her estranged husband, William Rawlings, with ownership of the stables and a portion of her inheritance.
This pitiful chapter in the fractured family’s history was to echo throughout Keats’ life, as further personal tragedy and financial uncertainty continually dogged him. Within the course of a few years, Keats lost his mother to tuberculosis in 1810, leading his grandmother to appoint guardians Richard Abbey and John Sandell to oversee the children’s lives and finances. It appears that Abbey was particularly prudent when it came to their financial management, only dispensing money begrudgingly.
Against such a background, Keats threw himself into his studies and became closer to John Clarke as a mentor and father figure who nurtured his interest in poetry and literature.
However, upon leaving school, and perhaps under the influence of his guardian, Keats entered the medical profession and took up an apprenticeship with a local doctor. While a respectable career for one of Keats’ social standing, it was to be a
Dr Hrileena Ghosh, an independent scholar, administrator of the Keats Foundation, and author of John Keats’ Medical Notebook: Text, Context & Poems,
explains how the poet’s medical training influenced his art:
One of Keats’ medical notebooks from his period training as a surgeon at Guy’s Hospital, London from 1815 to 1817 survives and is currently on display at Keats House. This document reveals that many characteristic features of Keats’ mature poetry are prefigured in his medical notes: striking imagery, a concentration of ideas into a single line or phrase, and an emphasis on verbal rhythm are all typical of Keats’ medical thought.
The long poem Endymion (1818) draws directly on his anatomical knowledge and vocabulary in its physiological treatment of passion; while many of the poems in the famous 1820 volume – including
The Eve of St Agnes, Ode to a Nightingale and Ode on Melancholy – comment on matters of contemporary medical debates and owe their conception, vocabulary or form to his medical training.
For Keats, creativity was fluid, and the qualities that enabled him to be successful as a surgical student are the qualities that, applied differently, enabled him to write enduring poetry. fleeting choice despite him eventually qualifying as a surgeon.
In 1816, the budding poet had his first sonnet, To Solitude, published in
The Examiner after sending it anonymously to the publication’s editor, Leigh Hunt. Shortly after finishing his training as a surgeon at Guy’s Hospital in March 1817, he promptly abandoned medicine as his devotion to poetry became paramount.
Fully embracing this new career, Keats soon entered the orbit of such Georgian literati as the aforementioned Hunt, Percy Shelley, William Hazlitt and, later, William Wordsworth. He also read voraciously, falling under the spell of such works as Ovid’s
Metamorphosis, John Milton’s
Paradise Lost, Shakespeare’s plays and, particularly, Edmund Spenser’s
The Faerie Queene. His friend
Charles Brown wrote: “It was The Faerie Queen that awakened his genius. In Spenser’s fairy land he was enchanted, breathed in a new world, and became another being.”
Indeed, one of Keats’ earliest poems, In Imitation of Spenser, drew heavily on the 16th-century poet’s epic and fantastical style.
By 1817, Keats had published his first collection of poetry, including
On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, I Stood Tip-Toe Upon a Little Hill ,and Sleep and Poetry, among others. While today the collection is considered by many a work that displays the poet’s youthful promise, its reception at the time was far less favourable.
The influential Blackwood’s Magazine, under the editorship of John Lockhart, unleashed a barrage of savage criticism, with some later even blaming the harsh reviews on Keats’ untimely demise. Yet the poet’s own words appear to reveal a greater stoicism on his part. Writing to his friend James Hessey, he stated, “My own domestic criticism has given me pain without comparison beyond what Blackwood or the Quarterly could possibly inflict.”
Undeterred, Keats continued his artistic exploration of highly conceptual ideas of beauty and truth within his poetry. He wrote in letters of this ongoing artistic struggle.
“I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination – what the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth – whether it existed before or not – for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love: they are all, in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty.”
In 1818, his long poem Endymion,
which he described as “a trial of my Powers of imagination”, was published, including the celebrated, transcendental opening line: “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever”. Again, the poem received poor reviews, with Lockhart once more contemptuously dismissing the “imperturbable drivelling idiocy of Endymion.”
Keats also finished other works, such as the tragic love story of the Middle Ages, Isabella or the Pot of Basil, and started on the epic
Hyperion (which would be revised as
The Fall of Hyperion the following year), recounting the Titans’ fall after being replaced by Gods. Sadly, tragedy again stalked Keats’ own life as his youngest brother, Tom, died from the “family disease” of tuberculosis on the first of December.
Following Tom’s death, Keats took up lodgings with his friend Charles Brown in one portion of Wentworth House in Hampstead, today known as Keats House, which houses a museum dedicated to the poet. Life at Wentworth House stimulated one of the most productive periods in Keats’ life, and he also began a tumultuous love affair with 18-year-old Fanny Brawne, the daughter of a widow,
Mrs Frances Brawne, who lived next door with her three children.
As their friendship blossomed into romance, the couple became engaged, although Keats was first determined to establish himself as a fully fledged poet before they married. It is clear that the lively and coquettish Fanny held an irresistible, if perplexing, charm for Keats. Some commentators believe his famous opening line “Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art” – in the poem of the same name – was written for Fanny. Yet, in a letter to his brother George in September 1819, the infatuated young poet wrote, “Nothing strikes me so forcibly with a sense of the rediculous as love – A Man in love I do think cuts the sorryest figure in the world.”
The period also saw the poet produce some of his best loved writing, including his paean to the conflicting beauty and darkness of the world, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, and his celebrated series of odes: Ode to Psyche, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode on
Melancholy and Ode on Indolence.
Sadly, this chapter of productivity and courtship was to be short-lived as Keats displayed the first signs of tuberculosis after suffering a lung haemorrhage in early 1820. His medical training left him in no doubt of the seriousness of his condition.
His friend Brown, recalled him saying: “I know the colour of that blood; it is arterial blood; I cannot be deceived in that colour; that drop of blood is my death warrant and I must die.”
The last months of his life saw
Keats nursed by friends and his fiancée, before making the arduous journey to Rome upon advice that the warmer climes might improve his condition, accompanied by the young painter Joseph Severn. However, while residing in rooms on the Piazza di Spagna, the disease that had devastated his entire family was to overcome him and John Keats died on 23 February 1821 in Severn’s arms.
The poet was buried in Rome’s Protestant cemetery with a gravestone bearing the words, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water” – a humble epitaph, widely believed to have been Keats’ dying wish.