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Keats's Early
Life
On October 31, 1795, John Keats was born at 24 Moorfields Pavement Row,
London. He was the son of Frances and Thomas Keats. In 1803, Keats
and his younger brother, George, were sent to John Clarke’s academy
in Enfield. There, Keats befriended Cowden Clarke, the headmaster’s
son. It was Clarke who first introduced Keats to the poet Edmund Spenser,
to romanticism, and to Mozart and Handel. On April 15, 1804, Thomas
Keats, John’s father, was thrown from a horse and suffered a
fatal skull fracture. Frances quickly remarried two months later. Her
marriage to her second husband, William Rawlings, only lasted
a year. Marriage separation laws of the time forced Frances to give
up legal control of her four children. Keats, along with his siblings,
was sent
to live with his grandmother in Enfield. When Keats was a young teenager,
his mother returned to the family. Desiring to please her, Keats became
very dedicated to his academic studies. Keats’s mother fell extremely
ill with tuberculosis in 1809, and in March 1810, she passed away.
The following summer, Keats left Enfield to become an apprentice for
an apothecary.
Finding a Career
Keats spent the next five years as an apprentice under an apothecary, Thomas
Hammond. After his apprenticeship with Hammond, Keats enrolled as a student
at Guy’s Hospital in London where he continued his apothecary
studies. Keats was made a dresser and worked under William Lucas, an incompetent
surgeon. While
working at Guy’s Hospital, Keats still found time
to read and write. On May 1, 1816, Keats’s first published work, “To
Solitude,” appeared in the Examiner, a weekly liberal newspaper.
Keats took some time off from his studies to travel to Margate, located on
the
coast, to write. In October of 1816, Keats wrote his first great sonnet, “On
first looking into Chapman’s Homer.” In 1817, Keats’s first
collection of poems was published in Poems. This book barely sold
and attracted no critical acclaim.
The Poetry Years
While Keats was preparing Endymion for publication, his brother Tom showed
signs of failing health. From March to May of 1816, Keats stayed by Tom’s
bedside. During this time, Keats wrote a preface to Endymion and planned
a walking tour of Northern England and Scotland with his friend Charles Armitage
Brown. While Keats attended to his brother Tom, Keats’s brother George
immigrated to America. When Brown and Keats returned from their walking tour,
they found Tom’s condition to be worsening. Tom died on December 1,
1818. In the year following Tom’s death, Keats invested even more of
his time in poetry writing. It was during this time that Keats created some
of his most popular works including “La Belle Dame sans Merci.”
The Final Years
In October 1819, Keats moved back to London after an emotional year in which
he had lost one brother to death and one to distance. In London, he rekindled
his romance with Fanny Brawne, a neighbor he met while nursing Tom. The
two became engaged but never married because his failing health
and devotion to poetry became points of contention in
their relationship. In February 1820, Keats suffered a hemorrhage, a sign
of tuberculosis. He remained confined to his house for months as he slowly
recovered. In 1820, he published his third volume, Lamia, Isabella, The
Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems. On September 18, 1820, Keats and
his friend Joseph Severn set sail for Italy. They reached Naples after a
difficult voyage
and then traveled to Rome. On December 10, 1820, Keats suffered a fatal relapse,
suffering from five hemorrhages over the next nine days. On February 23,
1821, Keats died in Rome in the arms of his friend Severn.