Keats, John

Keats, John, 1795–1821, English poet, b. London. He is considered one of the greatest of English poets.

The son of a livery stable keeper, Keats attended school at Enfield, where he became the friend of Charles Cowden Clarke, the headmaster's son, who encouraged his early learning. Apprenticed to a surgeon (1811), Keats came to know Leigh Hunt and his literary circle, and in 1816 he gave up surgery to write poetry. His first volume of poems appeared in 1817. It included "I stood tip-toe upon a little hill," "Sleep and Poetry," and the famous sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer."

Endymion, a long poem, was published in 1818. Although faulty in structure, it is nevertheless full of rich imagery and color. Keats returned from a walking tour in the Highlands to find himself attacked in Blackwood's Magazine—an article berated him for belonging to Leigh Hunt's "Cockney school" of poetry—and in the Quarterly Review. The critical assaults of 1818 mark a turning point in Keats's life; he was forced to examine his work more carefully, and as a result the influence of Hunt was diminished. However, these attacks did not contribute to Keats's decline in health and his early death, as Shelley maintained in his elegy "Adonais."

Keats's passionate love for Fanny Brawne seems to have begun in 1818. Fanny's letters to Keats's sister show that her critics' contention that she was a cruel flirt was not true. Only Keats's failing health prevented their marriage. He had contracted tuberculosis, probably from nursing his brother Tom, who died in 1818. With his friend, the artist Joseph Severn, Keats sailed for Italy shortly after the publication of Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820), which contains most of his important work and is probably the greatest single volume of poetry published in England in the 19th cent. He died in Rome in Feb., 1821, at the age of 25.

In spite of his tragically brief career, Keats is one of the most important English poets. He is also among the most personally appealing. Noble, generous, and sympathetic, he was capable not only of passionate love but also of warm, steadfast friendship. Keats is ranked, with Shelley and Byron, as one of the three great Romantic poets. Such poems as "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "To Autumn," and "Ode on Melancholy" are unequaled for dignity, melody, and richness of sensuous imagery. All of his poetry is filled with a mysterious and elevating sense of beauty and joy.

Keats's posthumous pieces include "La Belle Dame sans Merci," in its way as great an evocation of romantic medievalism as "The Eve of St. Agnes." Among his sonnets, familiar ones are "When I have fears that I may cease to be" and "Bright star! would I were as steadfast as thou art." "Lines on the Mermaid Tavern," "Fancy," and "Bards of Passion and of Mirth" are delightful short poems.

Some of Keats's finest work is in the unfinished epic "Hyperion." In recent years critical attention has focused on Keats's philosophy, which involves not abstract thought but rather absolute receptivity to experience. This attitude is indicated in his celebrated term "negative capability"—"to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thought."

Bibliography

Keats's letters (ed. by H. E. Rollins, 1958) vividly reveal his character, opinions, and feelings. See his poetical works, ed. by H. W. Garrod (2d ed. 1958); his autobiography, ed. by E. V. Weller (1933); biographies by A. Ward (1963), W. J. Bate (1963, repr. 1979), R. Gittings (1968), A. Motion (1998), and of his last days by J. E. Walsh (2000); studies by W. J. Bate (1945), M. Dickstein (1971), and D. van Ghent (1983).

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Keats, John

Keats, detail of an oil painting by Joseph Severn, 1821; in the National Portrait Gallery, London

(credit: Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London)

(born Oct. 31, 1795, London, Eng.—died Feb. 23, 1821, Rome, Papal States) English Romantic poet. The son of a livery-stable manager, he had a limited formal education. He worked as a surgeon's apprentice and assistant for several years before devoting himself entirely to poetry at age 21. His first mature work was the sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman's Homer” (1816). His long Endymion appeared in the same year (1818) as the first symptoms of the tuberculosis that would kill him at age 25. During a few intense months of 1819 he produced many of his greatest works: several great odes (including “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” and “To Autumn”), two unfinished versions of the story of the titan Hyperion, and “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” Most were published in the landmark collection Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820). Marked by vivid imagery, great sensuous appeal, and a yearning for the lost glories of the Classical world, his finest works are among the greatest of the English tradition. His letters are among the best by any English poet.

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Keats, John

(1795–1821) English poet died of consumption at 25. [Br. Lit.: Harvey, 443]

See : Death, Premature

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Keats, John

Born Oct. 31, 1795, in London; died Feb. 23, 1821, in Rome. English romantic poet.

After the publication of his first collections (in 1817 and later), Keats became the object of savage attacks by conservative critics: his life-affirming poetry sounded a challenge to the bigotry and hypocrisy of bourgeois society. Keats expressed his rejection of the triviality of the bourgeois world by turning to antiquity with its ideal of beauty and harmony (the narrative poem Endymion, 1818). He was caught up in the social enthusiasm of 1818–19; he became a close friend of P. B. Shelley and developed an interest in folklore (he wrote the poem “Robin Hood” in the tradition of R. Burns). In the narrative poem Hyperion (1819, published in 1820) Keats depicted the struggle of the Titans with the Olympian gods in the spirit of J. Milton, alluding allegorically to the revolutionary movement in Europe. The clash of pure feeling with falsehood and egoism is the subject of the short narrative poems “Lamia,” “Isabella,” and “The Eve of St. Agnes.” An outstanding romantic, Keats enriched poetic diction with expressiveness and revived the sonnet form in English literature. The bourgeois critics distort the meaning of Keats’ art by trying to represent him as an extoller of “pure” beauty and a precursor of decadence and a estheticism.

WORKS

The Poetical Works, 2nd ed. Oxford, 1958.
The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821, vols. 1–2. Cambridge, 1958.
In Russian translation:
In Khrestomatiia po zarubezhnoi literature XIX v., part 1. Moscow, 1955.
In Marshak, S. Werks, vol. 3. Moscow, 1959.

REFERENCES

Elistratova, A. Nasledie angliiskogo romantizma i sovremennost’, Moscow, 1960. Pages 431–93.
D’iakonova, N. “Esteticheskie vzgliady Kitsa.” Voprosy literatury, 1963, no. 8.
Critics on Keats. Edited by J. O’Neill. London [1967].
Twentieth Century Interpretations of Keats’s Odes: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J. [1968].
Jones, J. John Keats’s Dream of Truth. London, 1969.
Keats: The Critical Heritage. Edited by G. M. Matthews. London [1971].
MacGillivray, J. R. Keats: A Bibliography. Toronto, 1949.

B. A. GII.ENSON