English Romantic poet John Keats was born on October 31, 1795, in London. The oldest of four children, he lost both his parents at a young age. His father, a livery-stable keeper, died when Keats was eight; his mother died of tuberculosis six years later. After his mother's death, Keats's maternal grandmother appointed two London merchants, Richard Abbey and John Rowland Sandell, as guardians. Abbey, a prosperous tea broker, assumed the bulk of this responsibility, while Sandell played only a minor role. When Keats was fifteen, Abbey withdrew him from the Clarke School, Enfield, to apprentice with an apothecary-surgeon and study medicine in a London hospital. In 1816 Keats became a licensed apothecary, but he never practiced his profession, deciding instead to write poetry.
Around this time, Keats met Leigh Hunt, an influential editor of the
Examiner, who published his sonnets "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer"
and "O Solitude." Hunt also introduced Keats to a circle of literary men,
including the poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Wordsworth. The group's
influence enabled Keats to see his first volume, Poems by John Keats, published
in 1817. Shelley, who was fond of Keats, had advised him to develop a more
substantial body of work
before publishing it. Keats, who was not as fond of Shelley, did not
follow his advice. Endymion, a four-thousand-line erotic/allegorical romance
based on the Greek myth of the same name, appeared the following
year.
Two of the most influential critical magazines of the time, the Quarterly Review and Blackwood's Magazine, attacked the collection. Calling the romantic verse of Hunt's literary circle "the Cockney school of poetry," Blackwood's declared Endymion to be nonsense and recommended that Keats give up poetry. Shelley, who privately disliked Endymion but recognized Keats's genius, wrote a more favorable review, but it was never published. Shelley also exaggerated the effect that the criticism had on Keats, attributing his declining health over the following years to a spirit broken by the negative reviews.
Keats spent the summer of 1818 on a walking tour in Northern England
and Scotland, returning home to care for his brother, Tom, who suffered
from tuberculosis. While nursing his brother, Keats met and fell in love
with a woman named Fanny Brawne. Writing some of his finest poetry
between 1818 and 1819, Keats mainly worked on "Hyperion," a Miltonic
blank-verse epic of the Greek creation myth. He stopped writing "Hyperion"
upon the death of his brother, after completing only a small portion,
but in late 1819 he returned to the piece and rewrote it as "The
Fall of Hyperion" (unpublished until 1856). That same autumn Keats
contracted tuberculosis, and by the following February he felt that death
was already upon him, referring to the present as his "posthumous existence."
In July 1820, he published his third and best volume of poetry,
Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems. The three title
poems, dealing with mythical and legendary themes of ancient, medieval,
and Renaissance times, are rich in imagery and phrasing. The volume also
contains the unfinished "Hyperion," and three poems considered among
the finest in the English language, "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode on Melancholy,"
and "Ode to a Nightingale." The book received enthusiastic praise from
Hunt, Shelley, Charles Lamb, and others, and in August, Frances Jeffrey,
influential editor of the Edinburgh Review, wrote a review praising both
the new book and Endymion. The fragment "Hyperion" was considered by Keats's
contemporaries to be his greatest achievement, but by that time he
had reached an advanced stage of his disease and was too ill to be encouraged.
He continued a correspondence with Fanny Brawne and--when he could no longer
bear to write to her directly--her mother, but his failing health and his
literary ambitions prevented their getting married. Under his doctor's
orders to seek a warm climate for the winter, Keats went to Rome with his
friend, the painter Joseph Severn. He died there on February 23, 1821,
at the age of twenty-five, and was buried in the Protestant cemetery.
To Autumn
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing
sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round
the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness
to the core;
To swell the gourd,
and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding
more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o'er-brimm'd
their clammy cells.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad
may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing
wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies,
while thy hook
Spares the next swath
and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a
brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient
look,
Thou watchest the
last oozings, hours by hours.
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are
they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy
music too,--
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with
rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne
aloft
Or sinking as the
light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly
bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with
treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a
garden-croft,
And gathering swallows
twitter in the skies.
Ode on a Grecian Urn
Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of Silence and
slow Time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than
our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy
shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales
of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? what
maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels?
What wild ecstasy?
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft
pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of
no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst
not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees
be bare;
Bold lover, never,
never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal--yet, do not
grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast
not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou
love, and she be fair!
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the
Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever
new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be
enjoy'd,
For ever panting,
and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful
and cloy'd,
A burning forehead,
and a parching tongue.
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious
priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with
garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful
citadel,
Is emptied of this
folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul
to tell
Why thou art desolate,
can e'er return.
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease
us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold pastoral!
When old age shall this generation
waste,
Thou shalt remain,
in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'--that
is all
Ye know on earth,
and all ye need to know.