John Keats 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.