# The complete poetical works and letters of John Keats/Biographical Sketch

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
John Keats was born in Finsbury, London, on either the 29th or the 31st of October, 1795. He died in an apartment overlooking the Piazza di Spagna, Rome, February 23, 1821. Thus his life was a brief span of a few months more than twenty-five years, and as his first acknowledged verses were written in the autumn of 1813, and his last sonnet was composed in the autumn of 1820, his poetical career was seven years long. Within that time he composed the verses included in this volume, yet by far the largest portion may be referred to the three years 1818-1820, and if one distilled the whole, the precious deposit would be but a few hundred lines. For all that, perhaps because of it, and because Keats with his warm human passion wrote what is almost an autobiography in his letters, we are able to get a tolerably clear notion of his early training and associations, and to follow quite closely the development of his nature after he began to devote himself to poetry.
His father, Thomas Keats, was not a Londoner by birth, but came from the country to the town early, and was head hostler in a livery stable before he was twenty. He married Frances Jennings, the daughter of his master, who thereupon retired from business, leaving it in the hands of his son-in-law. The young couple lived over the stable at first, but when their family increased, they removed to a house in the neighborhood. John Keats was the first born. He had two brothers and a sister who grew to maturity. George Keats was sixteen months his junior; Thomas was four years younger, and Fanny, who was born in 1803, was a girl of ten when John Keats was making his first serious ventures in poetry.
The little that is known of Keats's parents is yet sufficient to show them persons of generous qualities and lively temperament. They were prosperous in their lives, and meant to better the condition of their children, so they sent the boys to good schools. The father died when John Keats was in his tenth year, and his mother shortly after married a man who appears to have been her husband's successor in business as well as in affections, but the marriage proved an unhappy one; there was a separation, and the stepfather scarcely came into the boy's life to affect him for good or for ill. He was still a school-boy, not yet fifteen, when his mother died, and he grieved for her with the force of a passionate nature that through a short life was to find various modes of expressing its keen sensibility.
As Keats went early to school, the influences which came most forcibly into his boyhood were from his brothers and schoolmates. Tom, the youngest brother, was always frail. George, who was nearer John's age, was like him in spirit and more robust. His recollections of his brothers, written after both Tom and John had died, are frank enough to make the relation undoubtedly truthful:—
​'I loved him [John] from boyhood, even when he wronged me, for the goodness of his heart and the nobleness of his spirit. Before we left school we quarrelled often, and fought fiercely, and I can safely say and my schoolfellows will bear witness, that John's temper was the cause of all, still we were more attached than brothers ever are. From the time we were boys at school, where we loved, jangled and fought alternately, until we separated in 1818, I in a great measure relieved him by continual sympathy, explanation and inexhaustible spirits and good humor, from many a bitter fit of hypochondriasm. He avoided teasing any one with his miseries but Tom and myself, and often asked our forgiveness; venting and discussing them gave him relief.'
The school which the boys attended was kept by the Rev. John Clarke at Enfield, and a son of Mr. Clarke was Charles Cowden Clarke, the 'ever young-hearted' as his happy-natured wife calls him, who was seven or eight years the senior of John Keats, but became his intimate friend and remained such through his life. Clarke's own reminiscence of his friend seems to fill out George Keats's sketch:—
'He was a favorite with all. Not the less beloved was he for having a highly pugnacious spirit, which when roused was one of the most picturesque exhibitions—off the stage—I ever saw. . . . His passion at times was almost ungovernable; and his brother George, being considerably the taller and stronger, used frequently to hold him down by main force, laughing when John was in one of his moods, and was endeavoring to beat him. It was all, however, a wisp-of-straw conflagration; for he had an intensely tender affection for his brothers, and proved it upon the most trying occasions. He was not merely the favorite of all, like a pet prize-fighter, for his terrier courage; but his highmindedness, his utter unconsciousness of a mean motive, his placability, his generosity, wrought so general a feeling in his behalf that I never heard a word of disapproval from any one, superior or equal, who had known him.'
The reader will look in vain for any signs of a polemic nature in Keats's verse, but it is easy enough to find witness to his moodiness, as in such a sonnet as that beginning:—
'Why did I laugh to-night? No voice will tell,'
and of the ungovernable passion there is evidence enough in his later life, though it took then another form. Yet the boyish impulsiveness which had its rude expression in animal spirits turned in youth into a headlong eagerness for books before, during, and after school hours. According to Charles Cowden Clarke he won all the literature prizes of the school, and took upon himself for fun the translation of the entire Æneid into prose. He read voraciously, and the same friend says: 'In my mind's eye I now see him at supper, sitting back on the form from the table, holding the folio volume of Burnet's History of his Own Time between himself and the table, eating his meal from behind it. This work, and Leigh Hunt's Examiner, which my father took in, and I used to lend to Keats—no ​doubt laid the foundation of his love of civil and religious liberty.' Still more definite in its relation to his art was the intimate acquaintance he then formed with Tooke's Pantheon and Lemprière's Dictionary.
The death of Keats's mother brought an interruption to his schooling. The grandmother, who was still living, created a trust for the benefit of the Keats children, and committed its care to two guardians, one of whom, Mr. Richard Abbey, was the active trustee, and though the fund seems to have been reasonably sufficient to protect the young people against the ordinary demands for a living, both John and George Keats seem always to have been sorely pinched for means. Mr. Abbey at once removed John Keats from school and had him apprenticed to a surgeon, Mr. Hammond, for a term of five years. Mr. Hammond lived at Edmonton, not far from Enfield, and Keats was wont to walk over to the Clarkes' once a week or oftener to see his friends and borrow books.
He was just fifteen when he began thus to equip himself for a place in the world, and for a little more than five years he was in training for the practice of medicine and surgery. His apprenticeship to Mr. Hammond did not last as long as this, for the indentures were cancelled about a year before the term expired, but Keats then went up to London to continue his studies at St. Thomas's and Guy's hospitals. He passed with credit his examination as licentiate at Apothecaries' Hall, July 26, 1815, and received an appointment at Guy's in the March following. It does not appear exactly when he abandoned his profession. It may be said, with some truth, that he never actually abandoned it in intention; he held it in reserve as a possible resort, but it seems doubtful if he ever took up the practice formally outside the walls of the hospital. Once when his friend Charles Cowden Clarke asked him about his attitude toward his profession, he expressed his grave doubt if he should go on with it. 'The other day,' he said to him, 'during the lecture, there came a sunbeam into the room, and with it a whole troop of creatures floating in the ray; and I was off with them to Oberon and fairy land.' 'My last operation,' he told another man, 'was the opening of a man's temporal artery. I did it with the utmost nicety, but reflecting on what passed through my mind at the time, my dexterity seemed a miracle, and I never took up the lancet again.'
It may be assumed that not later than the summer of 1816, when Keats was approaching his majority, he laid aside his instruments, never to resume them. It is not easy to reckon the contribution which these years of study and of brief practice in the medical art made to his intellectual, much less to his poetical development. With his active mind he no doubt appropriated some facts—perhaps we owe to his studies some lines in his verse, as that in 'Isabella,' where in describing the Ceylon diver contributing to the brothers' wealth, he says:—
'For them his ears gush'd blood;'
but it is more probable that, like many another young student, he went through his tasks with sufficient fidelity to secure proper credit, but without any of that ​devotion which is the only real 'learning by heart.' It is more to the purpose that during the years in which he was forming his mental habits, he was steadied by intellectual exercise while he was obeying instinctively the voice which was calling him more and more loudly.
The actual record of his poetry up to this date of the summer of 1816 is not extensive, but it is indicative of his growing power, of his taste in reading and observation, of his companionship, and most notably of his consciousness of the poetic spirit. Along with a few pieces like the lines 'To Some Ladies,' which show how little skill he had in making poetry a mere parlor maid, there are poems which show how he was struggling to do what other poets have done, as the lines 'To Hope' and the 'Ode' and 'Hymn to Apollo.' The lines 'To Hope,' with all their formal use of poetic conventions, have an interest from the attempt he makes at using the instrument he most highly valued in expressing his own moods and that youthful fervor which found a suburban Hampden in Leigh Hunt. His friendship with Hunt was in part founded on an admiration for the political hissing which Hunt and his friends kept up, and which was translated by his own independence of spirit into a valiant revolutionary sound, but more on an appreciation of Hunt's good taste in literature, his enjoyment of the Elizabethans and Milton, and his literary temper. Hunt was more of a public figure than Clarke or Reynolds, James Rice, Mathew, or any other of Keats's chosen companions, but the basis of Keats's friendship, apart from his brothers, was a community of literary taste more even than of literary production. It is a pleasure to get such glimpses as we do of this coterie exchanging books, revelling in their discovery of great authors who had been wrapped in the cerecloth of an antique speech, and celebrating their own admiration of these bards that 'gild the lapses of time.' It was not the Examiner that filled Keats's mind, it was Spenser and Milton, Chapman and Chaucer, and when he came away from Hunt's cottage, 'brimful of the friendliness' he there had found, it was of Lycidas and Petrarch and Laura that he sang as he fared on foot in the cool bleak air. In his 'Epistle to George Felton Mathew,' it is poetry and the brotherhood which springs from poetry that prompt the expression of friendship, and there is no prettier tale in literary friendship than that which shows Keats and Clarke sitting up through the night reading Chapman's Homer, and Keats in the morning sending his friend the well-turned sonnet which has been the key that unlocks Chapman to many readers.
These early verses thus are full of Keats's personal history, for he was living in the land of fancy and was rejoicing in the companionship of lovers of that land; but they are also witnesses to the feeling which he had for nature. It is true the flinging of himself on the grass, after being pent up in the city, is to read some 'debonair and gentle tale of love and languishment,' and a fair summer's eve suggests thoughts of Milton's fate and Sydney's bier; nevertheless, these expressions occur in the constricted sonnet. When Keats allows himself freedom and the rush of spontaneous emotion, as in the lines 'I stood tiptoe upon a little hill,' the reflection of nature in mythology and poetry is merely incidental to the joyous ​delight in nature itself, a delight so genuine that it almost covers from sight the half formal, half negligent beadroll of poetic subjects. Keats was born almost within sound of Bowbells, but his school days and early youth were spent in the rural environs of Enfield and Edmonton, and he escaped often from the city to Hampstead, not merely for companionship, but because there the nightingale sang, and there the walk in the woods or the stroll on the heath brought him face to face with the solitude which yielded indeed in his mind to pleasant converse, yet was, as he knew well, the direct road to converse with nature. Perhaps, in the lines, 'I stood tiptoe,' it is the close and loving observation of nature which first arrests one's attention, but a nearer scrutiny quickly reveals that imaginative rendering which lifts these lines far above the level of descriptive poetry. If in some of Wordsworth's sketches from nature written when he was of the same age one descries a profounder consciousness of human personality and a deeper sense of elemental relations, one is aware also of longer stretches of purely descriptive verse; with Keats there is an instant alchemy by which all sights and sounds are transmuted into the elements of a poetic world.
As this poem goes on it trembles into a half dreamy rapture of the poet away from all scenes into the world of visions, but it is in 'Sleep and Poetry,' written apparently at about the same time, that we discover a more precise witness to the poetic ideals now well formed in Keats's mind. The poet placed this piece last in his first printed volume, as if he intended to make it his personal apology. It is in part an impassioned plea for the freedom of imagination as against the artifices of the school of Pope, but even when thus half formally reciting his creed, Keats shows how little of the dogmatist there was in his nature, how little even of the critic, by the careless wandering of his own poem, and the unconscious expression of his own delight in everything that is beautiful in nature or art; so that as he writes his eye takes in the walls of the room where he lies, and he falls to versifying its contents. He thrills with the consciousness of being a poet, and flushes over the prospect of what he may do, yet at present what he does is rather the overflow of a poetic nature than the studied product of an artist.
The poems which precede 'Endymion' are many of them chiefly interesting for the hints they give thus of a nature which was gathering itself for a large leap. They are, as the reader will see, tentative excursions into the airy region, and they contain besides little witnesses to some of the important compelling influences which were forming Keats's mind. Thus the sonnets to Haydon illustrate Keats's recognition of Wordsworth, and also the great impression made upon him by the introduction which Haydon gave him to Greek art. They bear evidence, too, of his increasing study of Shakespeare and of his admiration for Milton, whose minor poems seem at this time to have exercised much influence over his style. Hunt's influence can be seen in the poems, but more indirectly than directly, for Hunt with his fine taste had done much to open the way to a return of lovers of poetry to the spacious days of Elizabeth. The poems are sometimes exercises, sometimes illuminations of a poetic mind, and they have a rare value to the student of poetry, ​as they disclose the mingling of great poetic traditions with the bursts of a poetic nature which was itself to add to the stock of great English verse.
There was about a year's space between Keats's abandonment of his profession and his occupation upon a long and serious poem. The group in this volume entitled 'Early Poems' gives the product of that period. That is, the pieces from 'I stood tiptoe upon a little hill' to the end of the section may be referred to this time, and the first one may fairly be taken as a sort of prologue to his adoption of a poetical life. When he was writing these poems he was living much with his brothers, to whom he was warmly attached, and was in a circle of ardent friends, men and women. He was an animated talker, with bursts of indignation, and a prey somewhat to moods of depression. His appearance has been described by many, and is thus summed up by Mr. Colvin: 'A small, handsome, ardent-looking youth—the stature little over five feet; the figure compact and well turned, with the neck thrust eagerly forward, carrying a strong and shapely head set off by thickly clustering gold-brown hair; the features powerful, finished, and mobile; the mouth rich and wide, with an expression at once combative and sensitive in the extreme; the forehead not high, but broad and strong; the eyebrows nobly arched, and eyes hazel-brown, liquid-flashing, visibly inspired—"an eye that had an inward look, perfectly divine, like a Delphian priestess who saw visions."'
Keats was in London and its neighborhood during most of this year, but after the publication of his first volume of poems he went to the Isle of Wight and later to the seashore, and soon began to occupy himself with his serious labor of 'Endymion.' While he was working upon this poem he wrote but few verses. His letters, however, show him immersed in literature and the friendships which with him were so identified with literature, and kept, moreover, in a state of restlessness by what in homely phrase may be termed the growing pains of his poetic nature. 'I went to the Isle of Wight,' he writes to Leigh Hunt, May 10, 1817, 'thought so much about poetry, so long together, that I could not get to sleep at night; and, moreover, I know not how it was, I could not get wholesome food. By this means, in a week or so, I became not over capable in my upper stories, and set off pell mell for Margate, at least a hundred and fifty miles, because, forsooth, I fancied that I should like my old lodging here, and could contrive to do without trees. Another thing, I was too much in solitude and consequently was obliged to be in continual burning of thought, as an only recourse. However, Tom is with me at present, and we are very comfortable. . . . These last two days I have felt more confident. I have asked myself so often why I should be a poet more than other men, seeing how great a thing it is,—how great things are to be gained by it, what a thing to be in the mouth of Fame,—that at last the idea has grown so monstrously beyond my seeming power of attainment, that the other day I nearly consented with myself to drop into a Phaethon. Yet 't is a disgrace to fail, even in a huge attempt; and at this moment I drive the thought from me.'
These lines were written when Keats was deep in 'Endymion,' and with others ​they intimate with some clearness how seriously Keats took himself, as the saying is. Much reading of great poetry had set standards for him rather than furnished models. It is not difficult to trace Keats's indebtedness to other poets, so far as words and turns of expression go, yet his confessed imitations show almost as conclusively as his original verse how incapable he was of merely reproducing out of the quarries of other poetry his own fair buildings. His was a nature possessed of poetic power, yet fed more than usual by great poetry. That he should have gone by turns to ancient mythology and mediæval romance for his themes, and have treated both in a spirit of romance, was due to a large artistic endowment, which bade him see both nature and humanity as subjects for composition, furnishing images to be delighted in. He was conscious of poetic genius, and never more so than when reading great poetry. In the presence of Shakespeare and Spenser he could exclaim, 'I too am a poet,' and this was no mere excitement such as hurries lesser men into clever copying, but an exhilaration which sent his pulses bounding as his own conceptions rose fair to view. It was obedience to this strong impulse to produce a great work of art which led him to sketch 'Endymion' and try his powers upon an attack on the very citadel of poetic beauty. Fame waved a wreath before him, yet it was not Fame but Poetry that really urged him forward. It is not unfair to translate even a confession of desire for fame into an acknowledgment of conscious power.
'Endymion' was published in the spring of 1818, and Keats's own attitude toward his work at this time is well expressed in the sonnet 'When I have fears that I may cease to be,' and in that written on sitting down to read King Lear once again. The very completion of his task set free new fancies, and there is a spontaneity in his occasional verse and in his letters which witnesses to a rapid maturing of power and a firmness of tread. The interesting letter to Reynolds of February 3, 1818, which contains a spirited criticism of Wordsworth and holds the Robin Hood verses, is quick with gay strength, and shows the poet alert and sane.
The publication of 'Endymion' was an important event to Keats and his circle. His earlier volume, the verses which he had since written and shown, and his own personality, had raised great expectations among his near friends and the few who could discern poetry without waiting for the poet to be famous; and now he was staking all, as it were, upon this single throw. The book was coarsely and roughly handled by the two leading reviews of the day, Blackwood's and the Quarterly. Criticism in those days was far from impersonal. A poet was condemned or praised, not for his work, but for his politics, the friends he associated with, his religion, and anything in his private life which might be known to the reviewer. Keats knew the worthlessness of much of this criticism, but he felt nevertheless keenly the hostility of what, rightly or wrongly, was looked upon as the supreme court in the republic of letters.
Under other circumstances he might have felt this even more keenly, and there appears to be evidence that he recurred afterward with bitterness to the attitude of the reviews; but just at this time other matters filled his mind. His brother, ​George Keats, with his wife, went to America to try fortune in the new world, and Keats immediately afterward took a long walking tour in the north with his friend Brown. His letters and the few poems of travel he wrote show how ardently he threw himself into this acquaintance with a new phase of nature. But he was to pass through experiences which entered more profoundly into life. In December of the same year, 1818, his brother Tom died. He had been his constant companion and nurse, and was with him at his death. Then, when his whole nature was deeply stirred, he came to know and ardently to love a girl who by turns fascinated and repelled him, until he was completely enthralled, without apparently finding in her the repose which his restless nature needed.
Keats's first mention of Fanny Brawne scarcely prepares one for the inroads made upon him by this personage during the rest of his short life. He went to live with his friend Brown after Tom's death, and Mrs. Brawne became his next-door neighbor. 'She is a very nice woman,' he writes, 'and her daughter senior is I think beautiful and elegant, graceful, silly, fashionable and strange. We have a little tiff now and then—and she behaves a little better, or I must have sheered off.' The passion which he conceived for Miss Brawne rapidly mounted into a dominant place, and it is one of the marks of Keats's deeper nature, not disclosed to his friends, intimate as he was with them, that for the two years which intervened before he left England a dying man, he carried this passion as a sort of vulture gnawing at his vitals, concealed for the most part, though not wholly. Some overt expression it found, as in the 'Ode to Fanny,' the 'Lines to Fanny,' and the verses addressed to the same person beginning:—
'I cry your pity—mercy—love, ay love,'
and it may be traced, with little doubt, in those poems which emphasize his moods, such as the 'Ode to Melancholy' and the sonnet beginning:—
'Why did I laugh to-night?'
and that also beginning:—
'The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone.'
The letters contain infrequent allusions, except of course the posthumously published letters to the lady herself.
But with this overmastering passion to reckon with, the student of Keats can scarcely avoid regarding it as strongly influencing the poet's career during his remaining days. The turbulent experience of death and love acted upon a physical organism predisposed to decay, and soon it was apparent that Keats was himself invaded by the disease of consumption, which had wasted his brother Tom. But before this ravaging of his powers set in, that is, during the first half of 1819, when he was at once deepened by sorrow and excited by love, he wrote that great group of poems which begins with 'The Eve of St. Agnes' and closes with 'Lamia.' If one takes as in some respects the high-water mark of his genius the mystic 'La Belle Dame sans merci,' it is not perhaps too speculative a judgment which sees the keenest anguish of a passionate soul transmuted into terms of impersonal ​poesy. There is no hectic flush about the poetry of this half year, but an increasing firmness of touch and rich, yet reserved imagination.
But great as his products were, he had not found his public, and the little property he had was slipping away, so that he was confronted by the fear of poverty as his weakness grew upon him. Nothing seemed to go well with him; his love affair brought him little else than exquisite pain. It is probable that on Keats's side the pride which was so dominant a chord in his nature forbade a man who could scarce support himself and felt the damp dews of decline chilling his vitality from seeking refuge in marriage with a girl who was in happier circumstance than he. He tried to turn his gifts into money by aiming at fortune with a play for the popular stage. He tried his hand at work for the periodicals. He even considered the possibility of returning to his profession of surgery for a livelihood. But all these projects failed him, and he turned with an almost savage and certainly sardonic humor to a scheme for flinging at the head of the public a popular poem. 'The Cap and Bells' is a melancholy example of what a great poet can produce who is consumed by a hopeless passion and wasted by disease.
Keats clung to his friends and wrote affectionate letters to his family. His brother George came over from America on a brief business visit, and was disturbed to find John so altered; and scarcely had George returned in January, 1820, than the poet had a sharp attack with loss of blood. He rallied as the spring came on, and early in the summer saw to the publication of his last volume, containing 'Hyperion, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, Lamia,' and the 'Odes,' perhaps the most precious cargo carried in a vessel of this size in English literature in this century.
A month after the publication of the volume he was writing to Shelley, who had sent him an invitation to visit him in Pisa: 'There is no doubt that an English winter would put an end to me, and do so in a lingering, hateful manner. Therefore, I must either voyage or journey to Italy, as a soldier marches up to a battery.' In September he put himself into the hands of his cheerful and steadfast friend Severn the artist, and they took passage for Naples. It was when they were detained by winds off the coast of England that Keats wrote his last sonnet, with its veiled homage to Fanny Brawne, and in Naples Harbor he wrote to Mrs. Brawne in a feverish mood: 'I dare not fix my mind upon Fanny, I have not dared to think of her. The only comfort I have had that way has been in thinking for hours together of having the knife she gave me put in a silver case—the hair in a locket—and the pocket-book in a gold net. Show her this. I dare say no more.' And then there is the letter to Brown, with its agony of separation, in which he gives way to the torment of his love, with despair written in every line. It is difficult to say as one thinks of Keats's ashes whether the fire of passion or the fire of physical consumption had most to do with causing them.
It was in November, 1820, that the travellers reached Rome, and for a little while Keats could take short strolls on the Pincian Hill; but the fatal disease was making rapid progress, and on the 22d of February, 1821, he died, and three days ​later he was buried in the Protestant cemetery, where upon his gravestone may be read the words which Keats had said of himself:—
'Here lies one whose name was writ in water.'
In his first sonnet on Fame, Keats, in a saner mood, puts by the temptation which would withdraw him from the high serenity of conscious worth. In the second, wherein he seems almost to be seeing Fanny Brawne mocking behind the figure of Fame, he shows a more scornful attitude. There is little doubt that notwithstanding his close companionship with poets living and dead Keats never could long escape from the allurements of this 'wayward girl,' yet it may surely be said that his escape was most complete when he was fulfilling the highest law of his nature and creating those images of beauty which have given him Fame while he sleeps.