Keats, John 1795-1821
English poet

He was born in London, the son of a livery-stable keeper, and went to school in Enfield. In 1811 he was apprenticed to a surgeon at Edmonton, and later (1815-17) was a medical student in the London hospitals, but took to writing poetry. Leigh Hunt, his neighbour in Hampstead, introduced him to other young Romantics, including Percy Bysshe Shelley, and published his first sonnets in The Examiner (1816). His first volume of poems (1817) combined 'Hymn to Pan' and the 'Bacchic procession' which anticipate the great odes to come. He published the long mythological poem Endymion in 1818. He returned from a walking tour in Scotland (1818), which exhausted him, to find the savage reviews of Endymion in Blackwood's Magazine, by John Gibson Lockhart, and the Quarterly. In addition, his younger brother Tom was dying of consumption, and his love affair with Fanny Brawne seems to have brought him more pain than comfort. It was under these circumstances that he published the volume of 1820, Lamia and Other Poems, a landmark in English poetry. Except for the romantic poem 'Isabella or The Pot of Basil', based on a story in Boccaccio's Decameron, and the first version of his epical poem, 'Hyperion', all the significant verse in this famous volume is the work of 1819, such as the two splendid romances 'The Eve of St Agnes' and 'Lamia', and the great odes - 'On a Grecian Urn', 'To a Nightingale', 'To Autumn', 'On Melancholy' and 'To Psyche'. In particular, 'The Eve of St Agnes' displays a wealth of sensuous imagery almost unequalled in English poetry. In 'Lamia', the best told of the tales, he turns from stanza form to the couplet as used by Dryden in his romantic Fables. Keats's letters are also greatly admired, and throw light on his poetical development no less than on his unhappy love affair with Fanny Brawne. It is clear that he was both attracted and repelled by the notion of the poet as teacher or prophet. Having prepared the 1820 volume for the press, Keats, now seriously ill with consumption, sailed for Italy in September 1820, reached Rome and died there attended only by his artist friend Joseph Severn (1793-1879). The house in which he died (26 Piazza di Spagna), at the foot of the Spanish steps, is now known as the Keats-Shelley house, a place of literary pilgrimage with an outstanding library of English Romantic literature.