John Keats And Literature Essay, Research Paper

John Keats, one of the greatest English poets and a major figure in the Romantic

movement, was born in 1795 in Moorfields, London. His father died when he was

eight and his mother when he was fourteen; these circumstances drew him

particularly close to his two brothers, George and Tom, and his sister Fanny.

Keats was well educated at a school in Enfield, where he began a translation of

Virgil’s Aeneid. In 1810 he was apprenticed to an apothecary-surgeon. His first

attempts at writing poetry date from about 1814, and include an `Imitation’ of

the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser. In 1815 he left his apprenticeship and

became a student at Guy’s Hospital, London; one year later, he abandoned the

profession of medicine for poetry. Keats’s first volume of poems was published

in 1817. It attracted some good reviews, but these were followed by the first of

several harsh attacks by the influential Blackwood’s Magazine. Undeterred, he

pressed on with his poem `Endymion’, which was published in the spring of the

following year. Keats toured the north of England and Scotland in the summer of

1818, returning home to nurse his brother Tom, who was ill with tuberculosis.

After Tom’s death in December he moved into a friend’s house in Hampstead, now

known as Keats House. There he met and fell deeply in love with a young

neighbour, Fanny Brawne. During the following year, despite ill health and

financial problems, he wrote an astonishing amount of poetry, including `The Eve

of St Agnes’, `La Belle Dame sans Merci’, `Ode to a Nightingale’ and `To

Autumn’. His second volume of poems appeared in July 1820; soon afterwards, by

now very ill with tuberculosis, he set off with a friend to Italy, where he died

the following February.