John Keats, born in London on October 31, 1795, stands as one of the most luminous figures in English literature, a testament to extraordinary talent flourishing despite a tragically brief life. As an author, Keats penned some of the most celebrated poems in the English language, achieving a remarkable career trajectory despite passing away at the young age of twenty-five. His output, though limited to fifty-four published poems across three volumes and various magazines, showcases an unparalleled mastery of poetic form and a profound exploration of human emotion and experience. Keats navigated diverse poetic structures, from the intimacy of the sonnet to the expansive Spenserian romance and the grandeur of the Miltonic epic. He redefined these forms through his unique poetic voice, characterized by a fervent intensity, a nuanced understanding of contrasting viewpoints, a self-aware poetic sensibility, and moments of subtle, ironic wit.
While now firmly placed within the British Romantic tradition, John Keats’s contemporary reception was markedly different. He wasn’t readily associated with the other prominent Romantic poets of his time, and often felt a sense of unease amongst them. Beyond the liberal intellectual circle of his friend Leigh Hunt, Keats’s work faced harsh criticism from the predominantly conservative reviewers of the era. They derided his poetry as sentimental and ill-mannered, labeling him an audacious “vulgar Cockney poetaster” (John Gibson Lockhart) whose work was filled with “the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language” (John Wilson Croker). Despite a solid education at Enfield Academy and medical training at Guy’s Hospital, Keats lacked formal literary schooling. Yet, today, John Keats is recognized as a perceptive reader, interpreter, and innovator of modern poetry. He understood the project of modern verse, which he traced back to William Wordsworth, as an endeavor to create poetry that found wonder not in mythology, but in the yearnings and sufferings of the human heart, within a world increasingly devoid of traditional mythic structures. Confronting the unique challenges of his literary and historical context, John Keats rapidly developed an exquisite and potent poetic style within a relatively small collection of poems. This stylistic mastery places him alongside William Shakespeare, particularly the Shakespeare of the sonnets, as one of the English language’s most exceptional lyric poets.
Early Life and Influences on John Keats’s Authorship
Contrary to some romanticized accounts suggesting John Keats was born in humble circumstances at his grandfather’s stable, the Swan and Hoop, near Finsbury Circus, solid evidence for this birthplace, or for exceptional poverty within his family, remains scarce. Thomas Keats, his father, initially managed the stable for his father-in-law and later became its owner. This provided a comfortable income, enabling the family to purchase a home and afford education at Enfield Academy for John and his brother George (1797-1841), under the tutelage of the progressive educator John Clarke. Young Tom Keats (1799-1818) later joined them. While details of Keats’s early home life are limited, it appears to have been a happy and close-knit family environment, filled with the lively atmosphere of a bustling London stable and inn. Frances Keats, his mother, was deeply devoted to her children, especially to John, her favorite, a devotion he reciprocated intensely. Under his father’s management, the family business prospered, leading to aspirations of sending John to Harrow for further education.
At eight years old, John Keats enrolled at Enfield Academy, forming a significant friendship with Charles Cowden Clarke, the headmaster’s fifteen-year-old son. Far from being a reserved, scholarly child, Clarke remembered Keats as an outgoing and spirited youth, easily making friends and fiercely defending them. Clarke noted, “He was not merely the ‘favorite of all,’ like a pet prize-fighter, for his terrier courage; but his high-mindedness, 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.” However, tragedy struck early in Keats’s life. On April 15, 1804, less than a year into his schooling, his father suffered a fatal accident, falling from his horse on his way home and dying the next day. This event profoundly impacted the family, both emotionally and financially. Within two months, Frances Keats moved her children to her mother’s home and remarried. This second marriage proved disastrous, and after losing the stables and part of her inheritance to her estranged husband, William Rawlings, Keats’s mother seemingly left the family, possibly to live with another man. By 1808, she returned, ill and broken, succumbing to tuberculosis in March 1809, mirroring her brother’s death just months prior. John, as the eldest male, assumed a protective role for his siblings, George, Tom, and Fanny Keats, a fierce loyalty he maintained throughout his life. His most insightful and poignant letters on poetry’s connection to personal experience, human suffering, and spiritual growth were addressed to his brothers.
John Keats, a portrait highlighting the contemplative nature often found in his poetry, reflecting his deep engagement with human emotions and the beauty of the world.
At Enfield, John Keats developed a closer relationship with headmaster John Clarke and his son, Cowden. He became a favored pupil, reading extensively and earning top honors in essay contests during his final terms. This academic dedication was partly a response to the loneliness following his mother’s death. Yet, even before this loss, he had already won an essay contest and begun translating Latin and French. Keats’s profound love for literature and his association of imaginative life with liberal intellectualism began at Clarke’s school. The academy was modeled after Dissenting academies, fostering broad reading in classical and modern languages, alongside history and modern science. Discipline was light, encouraging students to pursue their interests through rewards and prizes. Clarke himself was associated with radical reformers and subscribed to Leigh Hunt’s Examiner, which Cowden Clarke believed “no doubt laid the foundation of [Keats’s] love of civil and religious liberty.”
John Keats’s burgeoning appreciation for the power and romance of literature was nurtured by the Clarkes, who encouraged him to explore their library. Cowden Clarke recalled Keats reading histories, novels, and travel narratives. However, the books that captivated him repeatedly were Tooke’s ‘Pantheon,’ Lamprière’s ‘Classical Dictionary’—which he seemed to memorize—and Spence’s ‘Polymetis.’ These works became the foundation of his deep understanding of Greek mythology. Independently, Keats translated much of the Aeneid and continued his French studies. For Keats, literature was more than just an escape for a lonely orphan; it was a realm for energetic exploration, the “realms of gold” he later described. It was alluring not only as an idealistic escape but also as a source of beauty that broadened imaginative sympathies. Throughout his life, friends noted his industriousness and generosity. Literature, for John Keats the author, was a vocation to be pursued with dedication and effort for the insights and beauty it could offer humanity. This image of Keats—pugnacious in his entry into literary circles and compassionate toward others, justifying his literary path—is consistently portrayed in accounts of his life.
From Medicine to Muse: Keats’s Literary Awakening
By 1810, John Keats, then fifteen or sixteen, was under the guardianship of his seventy-five-year-old grandmother, Alice Whalley Jennings, who was responsible for the four orphaned children. She had inherited a substantial sum and, to secure their financial future, appointed Richard Abbey, a tea merchant, as trustee, acting on her attorney’s advice. This decision would later contribute to Keats’s financial struggles. While not malicious, Abbey was narrow-minded and conventional, particularly frugal and often dishonest concerning money. He dispensed the children’s funds reluctantly and liberally interpreted the terms of the will. It wasn’t until 1833, years after Fanny Keats reached adulthood, that she achieved a legal settlement. Estimates suggest that by Keats’s death in 1821, Abbey had withheld or Keats had unknowingly missed out on approximately £2,000, a considerable inheritance at a time when £50 per year was a living wage and £100-200 offered a comfortable life. Keats left Enfield in 1811 and, perhaps at Abbey’s suggestion—though Clarke recalled it as Keats’s choice—began training for a surgical career. He was apprenticed to Thomas Hammond, a respected surgeon in Edmonton, near Enfield, where his grandmother resided.
Little is known of John Keats’s life between 1811 and 1814, except that he assisted Hammond and studied anatomy and physiology. Surgery was a respectable and practical profession for someone of Keats’s background. Unlike physicians, surgeons in Keats’s era didn’t require a university degree; licensing was through examination. Surgeons were general practitioners, setting fractures, treating wounds, and administering vaccinations. Keats maintained he was “ambitious of doing the world some good,” and likely began his medical career with enthusiasm. However, living in small rooms above the surgery, Keats grew restless and isolated. He started exploring nearby woods and walking to Enfield to visit the Clarkes. He completed his Aeneid translation and, according to Cowden Clarke, “devoured rather than read” borrowed books: Ovid’s Metamorphosis, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Virgil’s Eclogues, among many others. But it was Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene that dramatically ignited his passion for poetry and sparked self-awareness of his imaginative capabilities.
This marked a turning point. The close friendship with Cowden Clarke, evenings at the headmaster’s table, and late-night discussions about books borrowed from the library were crucial in shaping John Keats into a poet. His friend Charles Brown believed Keats first encountered Spenser around eighteen, in 1813 or 1814. Brown observed, “From his earliest boyhood he had an acute sense of beauty, whether in a flower, a tree, the sky, or the animal world; how was it that his sense of beauty did not naturally seek in his mind for images by which he could best express his feelings? It was the ‘Fairy Queen’ that awakened his genius. In Spenser’s fairy land he was enchanted, breathed in a new world, and became another being.” Soon, Brown wrote, Keats was “entirely absorbed in poetry.” Clarke remembered Keats’s exuberance, “he ramped through the scenes of that… purely poetical romance, like a young horse into a Spring meadow.” Around 1814, John Keats Authored his first poem, “In Imitation of Spenser.” Remarkable for a first work, it displayed vitality, adopting Spenserian rhyme and rich imagery to create a romantically sensual dream world. Though youthful, the poem demonstrated a keen poetic ear, a delight in natural description, and a bold confidence in the power of poetic imagery to evoke dreamy scenes.
Political Awakening and Literary Circles
However, John Keats’s shift to poetry as a vocation over the next year or two involved more than just “pure poetry.” Politics played a significant, decisive role. As early as 1812, Cowden Clarke had met Leigh Hunt, the radical publisher of The Examiner. By 1814, Clarke frequently visited Hunt in prison (imprisoned in 1813 for libeling the Prince Regent). Keats must have been captivated by a different kind of romance than Spenser’s – the allure of London’s circle of artists and intellectuals who championed progressive causes, democratic reform, and opposed the aristocratic counter-revolution against Napoleon. Within these liberal circles of the Regency bourgeoisie, John Keats, even as an outsider, could hope to gain recognition through his political zeal and poetic talent. His subsequent poems took on political themes. In April 1814, following Napoleon’s defeat by European monarchs, amid general English optimism, liberals, including Keats in “On Peace,” urged the victors to support reform. This sonnet, his first, was somewhat clumsy and strident, but it signaled Keats’s intention to make an impact. In February 1815, upon Hunt’s release, Keats offered a sonnet, “Written on the Day That Mr. Leigh Hunt Left Prison,” via Cowden Clarke, who he encountered on his way to meet Hunt. Clarke recalled, “when taking leave, he gave me the sonnet… how clearly do I recall the conscious look and hesitation with which he offered it!” The publication of this sonnet in Poems (1817) would be noted by conservative reviewers, later criticizing him as an associate of Hunt. Taking a political stance so early in his career was a bold move in a period of intense political passions.
John Keats’s political views may have contributed to a falling out with Dr. Hammond. It’s known they quarreled, leading to Keats prematurely leaving his apprenticeship. On October 1, 1815, Keats moved to London and enrolled at Guy’s Hospital for a six-month course required to become a licensed surgeon and apothecary. This relocation to the Borough, south of London Bridge, was exciting for Keats. He was closer to his family; his grandmother had died in December 1814, and George and Tom were apprenticed at Abbey’s countinghouse (Fanny lived with the Abbeys). Before this move, Keats in 1815 seemed moody and at times deeply depressed. In his February 1815 poem “To Hope,” he mentions “hateful thoughts [that] enwrap my soul in gloom,” and “sad Despondency.” This could be seen as fashionable literary posing—he had recently praised Byron’s “sweetly sad” melody—and it takes a political turn, viewing “Hope” as a principle of social liberation. His brother recalled this period as one of brooding uncertainty, with his grandmother’s death likely amplifying his anxiety to stabilize his family, already fractured by loss. More urgently, perhaps, in the politically charged atmosphere of Napoleon’s brief return (March-June, culminating in Waterloo), Keats yearned to contribute to the liberal cause through poetry. He remained committed to his surgical career but was determined to find time for verse.
To alleviate John’s moods, his brother George introduced him to Caroline and Anne Mathew and their cousin, aspiring poet George Felton Mathew. Keats’s friendship with Mathew was brief but stimulating. With the sisters, Keats maintained a conventional literary friendship, addressing somewhat stilted poems to them. However, the connection with George Mathew boosted his morale and reinforced his poetic ambitions. Here was a fellow poet who, initially at least, seemed to share his literary tastes and encourage his poetry. While his brother remembered Keats’s emotional distress, Mathew, writing later, recalled Keats enjoying “good health—a fine flow of animal spirits—was fond of company—could amuse himself admirably with the frivolities of life—and had great confidence in himself.” Mathew was more reserved and conservative; the friendship soon cooled. Nevertheless, in November 1815, Keats dedicated his longest poem to date, “To George Felton Mathew,” in heroic couplets modeled on Elizabethan verse epistles. Despite the verse’s stiffness, the style, colloquial yet descriptively rich, hinted at Keats’s developing voice, influenced by Hunt and Wordsworth. The poem touched on themes that would become characteristic: poets as a “brotherhood” with “genius-loving hearts,” representing “the cause of freedom” as much as political figures, and bringing “healing” to a suffering world through timeless myth.
Medical Studies and the Allure of Poetry
Few English authors have had as much direct experience with suffering as John Keats. Until the summer of 1816, he studied medicine at Guy’s Hospital, excelling enough to be promoted to “dresser” quickly. His duties involved daily wound dressing, setting bones, and assisting in surgery. He adapted well to the work, lodging with older students at 28 St. Thomas Street, attending lectures by prominent surgeon Astley Cooper, and taking courses in anatomy, physiology, botany, chemistry, and medical practice. Yet, by spring 1816, he was clearly becoming restless and defensive about his growing passion for poetry. He was increasingly drawn to the modern poetry of Wordsworth (whose 1815 Poems he acquired upon entering Guy’s), attracted to its naturalism and direct appeal to secular imagination, so different from Spenser’s romance. Leigh Hunt’s influence also persisted; Hunt’s colloquial poetic diction seemed daring to the twenty-year-old Keats, who associated Hunt’s 1816 Examiner poems with an anti-authoritarian movement that included modern poetry. Keats began to speak of poetry, almost exclusively, to his fellow students with a blend of insecurity and arrogance. His roommate Henry Stephens recalled, “Medical knowledge was beneath his attention… no—Poetry was to his mind the zenith of all his Aspirations—The only thing worthy the attention of superior minds…. The greatest men in the world were the Poets, and to rank among them was the chief object of his ambition…. This feeling was accompanied with a good deal of Pride and some conceit; and that amongst mere Medical students, he would walk & talk as one of the Gods might be supposed to do, when mingling with mortals.” While perhaps exaggerated, this account reveals Keats’s growing self-perception as a man of literature. Enthusiastic about Hunt’s poetry, he sent The Examiner a sonnet written the previous autumn, “Solitude,” published on May 5, 1816. Stephens noted, “he was exceedingly gratified.”
Despite his lofty view of the poet’s role in 1816, John Keats unfortunately chose Leigh Hunt as a primary model. Hunt’s typical style was characterized by mannered luxuriance, abundant –y and –ly modifiers, adjectives derived from nouns and verbs (“bosomy,” “scattery,” “tremblingly”), and a jaunty colloquialism. Hunt’s influence is evident in light verses Keats scribbled in Stephens’s notebook: “Give me women, wine and snuff, / Until I cry out ‘hold, enough!’” and in verses starting in the style of Hunt’s Story of Rimini (1815): “Specimen of an Induction to a Poem”: “Lo! I must tell a tale of chivalry; / For while I muse, the lance points slantingly / Athwart the morning air: some lady sweet … Hails it with tears.” This poem shows Hunt’s preference for enjambment over the end-stopped couplets of Alexander Pope. Hunt also favored fluid lines pausing later, after “weak” syllables, rejecting median caesurae. This (now obscure) argument had political resonance for Hunt, aiming to break the “aristocratic” sound of heroic couplets favored by conservative tastemakers. (Lord Byron, disagreeing with Hunt’s theories, never fully forgave Keats for his critique of Pope in “Sleep and Poetry.”)
However, while Hunt’s poetic elements seemed declassé to critics of Hunt and Keats, Hunt’s influence wasn’t entirely negative. Hunt was not Keats’s sole model. Spenser remained a more profound and lasting influence, alongside Browne, Drayton, Milton, Wordsworth, and later, Shakespeare. Most young poets need models, and there were far more pedestrian choices in Keats’s time. Furthermore, emulating a more prominent contemporary poet like Byron might not have energized Keats’s verse as Hunt did. Hunt enabled Keats to begin writing and, eventually, surpass him. For a young middle-class liberal without university training, a healthy disdain for Pope and enthusiasm for Hunt and Wordsworth provided a sense of identity. Finally, even in 1815-1816, Keats was not simply an imitator. His works display a troubled self-awareness absent in Hunt’s. Keats’s poems often involve escapes into nature, and these tropes reveal his early and astute understanding of Wordsworth’s poetic project, as much as Hunt’s. In poems like the sonnet “How many bards gild the lapses of time!” the “Ode to Apollo,” or the sonnet “Oh! how I love, on a fair summer’s eve,” a key Keatsian theme emerges: the poem about the poet’s own self-perception as a modern figure, preparing to craft new poetry from his experiences, matching England’s literary giants.
Defining Poetic Purpose and First Success
On July 25, 1816, John Keats passed his surgical examinations and left London for Margate, a fashionable seaside resort. It had been a demanding year, and Keats needed respite from London’s oppressive heat and grime to reflect. Here, he confronted his struggle to become a poet in a longer, more confident poem, Epistle to My Brother George, inspired by Hunt’s verse epistles in The Examiner, but significant in its own right. In it, Keats explored what it meant for him “to strive to think divinely,” to possess a poet’s imaginative vision while absorbing nature’s sights and sounds with Wordsworthian “wise passiveness.” As common in Romantic poetry, a poet’s lament about lacking vision itself becomes a vision of what he might see if he were a true poet. After about fifty lines of such inspiration, Keats abruptly stops—”And should I ever see [visions], I will tell you / Such tales as must with amazement spell you”—shifting to a long, rambling speech by a dying poet celebrating the joy he brought the world. Despite its sketchiness and Keats’s evident self-frustration, this poem and the other Margate epistle, “To Charles Cowden Clarke,” are notable for their brave and serious tone of self-exploration. Keats, grappling with his debts to other poets and his aspirations, discovered a theme that would launch his career.
He returned to London in late September, taking rooms near Guy’s Hospital at 9 Dean Street, and resumed his work as a dresser until he could formally assume surgical duties on his twenty-first birthday in October. Despite the seemingly dreary start, October would be pivotal for the young poet.
Cowden Clarke, now living in London, eagerly received Keats’s long epistle. One evening in early October, Clarke invited Keats to his Clerkenwell rooms, keen to show him a volume circulating in Hunt’s circle: a 1616 folio edition of George Chapman’s Homer translation. The two friends studied the volume until dawn. Upon returning home, Keats immediately composed a sonnet, initially titled “On the first looking into Chapman’s Homer.” Filled with pride and excitement, he sent it to Clarke that morning. Keats undoubtedly felt, as critics agree, that this was his most accomplished poem to date, his most beautifully written and sustained verse.
George Chapman’s Homer, a visual representation of the literary work that profoundly impacted Keats, sparking his creativity and leading to the creation of his famous sonnet.
As often, Keats wrote the “Homer” sonnet in response to another poet’s imaginative power. Again, that power is perceived as an absence, a gap between Keats’s small voice—or any individual’s experience—and the sublime vastness of great imagination. Unlike his earlier sonnets, inspired by Hunt’s natural charm, this sonnet is structured around expressing the irresolvable contradictions of experience through verse elements—quatrain, octave, sestet, rhymes, words, sounds. In this sonnet, literary discovery’s excitement—Keats, reading Homer, feels not mere bookish pleasure but the awe of a conquistador reaching an uncharted sea—is presented as direct emotion, not self-conscious posturing. The emotion is sustained and controlled, with unflinching diction and sound, as in the sense of vast wonder suggested by long vowels (“wild,” “surmise,” “silent”) tapering to hushed awe in the final word, “Silent, upon a peak in Darien.” Published (with a line altered, in The Examiner, December 1, 1816), the sonnet stands with Wordsworth’s and Keats’s own best sonnets of the nineteenth century.
Keats carefully copied this sonnet and other poems, giving them to Clarke to show Hunt at his Hampstead cottage. Hunt, who had already published a Keats sonnet, was eager to meet him. Keats wrote to Clarke on October 9, “‘t will be an Era in my existence.” It truly was.
That month, John Keats met not only Hunt, but also lifelong friends and supporters: John Hamilton Reynolds and Benjamin Haydon. Soon after, he met Shelley’s publisher, Charles Ollier, who would publish Keats’s first volume. Hunt recalled their first meeting: “the impression made upon me by the exuberant specimens of genuine though young poetry that were laid before me, and the promise of which was seconded by the fine fervid countenance of the writer. We became intimate on the spot, and I found the young poet’s heart as warm as his imagination.” Clarke called it “`a red-letter day’ in the young poet’s life, and one which will never fade with me while memory lasts… Keats was suddenly made a familiar of the household, and was always welcomed.” This remained true until Keats’s final months, when, despite judging Hunt as egotistical and manipulative and rejecting his poetic influence, the ailing poet still sought refuge at the Hunts’.
Literary Recognition and the First Volume
Despite any later reservations about Hunt, John Keats always considered Hampstead a haven. Hunt’s pleasant domesticity in beautiful surroundings harmonized with the refined urbanity of Regency culture: books, paintings, music, liberal politics, and literary conversations with talented contemporaries. Keats moved to lodgings at 76 Cheapside with his brothers, George and Tom, in November. Until Tom’s death two years later, this would be Keats’s happiest home. He frequently visited Hunt’s, his friendships growing with Reynolds and the eccentric Haydon. Reynolds, Keats’s age, a moderately successful poet and essayist, had a quick mind and literary polish. He soon introduced Keats to John Taylor and James Hessey, who became his publishers after Ollier; to Charles (Armitage) Brown, a worldly businessman and loyal friend who traveled with Keats and shared his home at Wentworth Place, Hampstead (now Keats House and Museum); to Charles and Maria Dilke, who built Wentworth Place; and Benjamin Bailey, an Oxford student with whom Keats stayed the following fall. Haydon’s vast canvases and boisterous self-confidence impressed Keats with the idea that modern artists could create epic works. Haydon introduced Keats to William Hazlitt, whose notions of poetic energy, “gusto,” and imagination as intensified sensory experience, enabling self-transcendence, initiated Keats’s aesthetic reflections.
When Keats stayed at Hunt’s, a cot was set up in the library. Here, in November and December 1816, he planned his long poems “I stood tip-toe” and “Sleep and Poetry.” Though their diction is sometimes immature and syntax convoluted, these were Keats’s first serious long poems intended for publication, introducing enduring themes. By November, Hunt was planning a volume of his protégés’ verse, published by the Olliers. “I stood tip-toe,” begun earlier that summer as a treatment of the Endymion myth, was expanded for this purpose. Keats’s purpose was Wordsworthian: to write nature-inspired poetry that would rise to myth. Nature inspires poets to sing of mythic figures, but the poet is also called by “unearthly singing” from a divine resting place. This divine-human encounter is symbolized by Endymion’s marriage to Cynthia, initiating a regenerated world of art and poetry. Keats finished this poem in December, tentatively calling it Endymion, his first poetic use of the myth.
“Sleep and Poetry,” written in December, was more serious, outlining a poetic project and manifesto. Poetry is distinguished from mere sleep or dreams by engaging “the strife of human hearts,” life’s sorrows, and originating from immersion in sensory joys. Keats aligned himself with Wordsworth’s naturalism, attacking neoclassical “foppery.” He would begin his poetic education in nature to understand the human heart. Poetry’s “great end” is to be “a friend / To sooth the cares, and lift the thoughts of man.” The poem ends with the idea of a literary “brotherhood” as the poet returns to Hunt’s library, an ideal union of natural grace, liberality, and poetic tradition. While rooted in the verse epistles, this poem was Keats’s most earnest attempt to find literature’s purpose in modern life, asserting a new poetry had begun, a modern humanism rooted in nature and myth. Contemporary critics immediately grasped, and condemned, this young poet’s radical associations—more offensive than the poem’s Huntian lapses and adolescent posturing.
On December 1, Hunt published a brief Examiner notice of “Young Poets”—Shelley, Keats, and Reynolds—extolling a “new school” that would “revive Nature” and “put a spirit of youth in everything.’” He quoted the “excellent” “Homer” sonnet in full. Around this time, John Keats resolved to abandon medicine for poetry. Stephens believed this notice “sealed his fate,” causing an immediate change of heart. However, Charles Brown recalled Keats’s disillusionment with surgery and fear of causing suffering due to inadequacy. The truth was likely a mix of factors, but the excitement of these months and the promise of a published volume boosted his confidence. In December, Haydon took Keats’s life mask for his painting Christ’s Entry Into Jerusalem, including Keats behind Wordsworth.
Later that month, Shelley’s arrival at the Hunt household, following his wife Harriet’s suicide, caused commotion. Shelley planned to marry Mary Godwin and fight for custody of his children. Amidst excitement over Keats’s upcoming volume, Shelley also demanded attention. The two poets frequently walked across the Heath that winter. Shelley cautioned Keats to delay publication until he had a more mature body of work. Good advice, perhaps, but Keats never warmed to Shelley as Shelley did to him and seemed annoyed when Hunt moved to Marlow for an extended stay with Shelley that spring.
John Keats’s first volume, Poems, appeared on March 3, 1817, dedicated to Leigh Hunt. It opened with “I stood tip-toe,” closed with “Sleep and Poetry,” and included youthful poems and recent, stronger works. It received about six notices, half from Keats’s circle. In October 1817, a polite review in the Edinburgh Magazine, and Literary Miscellany warned him to “Cast off the uncleanness of [Hunt’s] school.” Months later, in The Examiner, Hunt praised Wordsworth’s revolutionary poetry and positioned Keats as a second-wave poet, though his praise for Keats’s poetry was reserved. The volume was unsuccessful, with few sales. “The book might have emerged in Timbuctoo,” Clarke recalled. One of the Ollier brothers wrote to George Keats, “We regret that your brother ever requested us to publish his book… By far the greater number of persons who have purchased it from us have found fault with it in such plain terms, that we have in many cases offered to take the book back rather than be annoyed with the ridicule which has, time after time, been showered upon it.”
On March 1, Hunt hosted Keats to celebrate publication. After dinner, Hunt crowned Keats with laurel, Keats crowned Hunt with ivy, and Hunt suggested a fifteen-minute sonnet-writing contest to commemorate the event. Keats dashed off a poor sonnet, published by Hunt to Keats’s dismay. Horribly embarrassed and angered by Hunt’s frivolity, Keats sought out Haydon the next day. They visited the Elgin Marbles, which Haydon had advocated for. That evening, Keats wrote his sonnet “[On Seeing the Elgin Marbles],” a powerful evocation of monumental art’s grandeur against the individual artist’s aspirations, human frailty against an aesthetic vision of gods.
Endymion and Critical Backlash
Undeterred by poor book sales, John Keats resolved to start a major poem, focusing on the theme that had sparked his most profound thought: humanity’s striving for unity with ideals and gods. He decided to escape to the seaside. Before leaving for the Isle of Wight on April 14, he and his brothers moved to Hampstead, hoping country air would benefit Tom, who was becoming ill. He also arranged for John Taylor of Taylor and Hessey to become his new publisher, a supportive association for years.
On the Isle of Wight, he spent weeks alone, writing to Haydon about his new passion for Shakespeare, whose works he carried, and whose portrait he hung over his desk. His goal was a four-thousand-line poem, Endymion, by autumn. Unrealistic, yet bold, he sat for weeks anxious and unproductive, though moved by the sea’s beauty. His friends’ faith sustained him. Reynolds wrote a positive Poems review in Champion (March 9, 1817). Haydon wrote, “bless you My dear Keats go on, dont despair… read Shakespeare and trust in Providence.” Taylor advanced him money, writing to his father, “I cannot think he will fail to become a great Poet.”
By late April, he completed part of Book I, the “Hymn to Pan.” Yet he was lonely, nervous, and blocked. He left Isle of Wight for Margate, where he had been productive before. In May, he went to Canterbury with Tom, hoping “the Remembrance of Chaucer will set me forward like a Billiard-Ball,” as he wrote Taylor. By June, he was back in Hampstead, spending days with painter Joseph Severn, who would remain with Keats until his death, and with Reynolds, reading Shakespeare. By August, Endymion was half-finished, two thousand lines.
Severn observed Keats’s growing sympathy, imaginative identification valued as poetic sensitivity. Keats was exceptionally attuned to his surroundings: “Nothing seemed to escape him, the song of a bird and the undertone of response from covert or hedge, the rustle of some animal,” Haydon said. “The humming of a bee, the sight of a flower, the glitter of the sun, seemed to make his nature tremble!” This self-transcendence through loving beauty became crucial for Keats, confirmed by Hazlitt’s imagination theories, evolving into a moral principle of love for good. This became Keats’s justification for the aesthetic life, implied even in Endymion.
He worked on the poem through late summer and fall 1817, aiming for forty lines daily, a remarkable but inconsistent project for a novice poet. However, it matured him into a thoughtful, self-critical poet. During these months, his friendship with Benjamin Bailey deepened, while he saw less of Hunt. “Every one who met him,” Brown recalled, “sought for his society, and he was surrounded by a little circle of hearty friends.” Bailey remembered him as “socially… the most loveable creature… as distinguished from amiable, I think I ever knew as a man.” Bailey invited him to Oxford in September. Amidst autumn foliage and academic camaraderie, Keats wrote Book III of Endymion. With Bailey, he read Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Milton, Dante. Bailey, methodical, and Keats, lively, were excellent study partners, allowing Keats to write easily and enjoy afternoons boating and visiting Stratford-upon-Avon.
He returned from Oxford in October with new seriousness. Weary of Endymion, he planned another long poem. In London, trouble brewed. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (October 1817) published “On the Cockney School of Poetry,” the first vicious attack on Hunt, ominous for Keats. Tom’s consumption worsened; a continental trip was planned. George was jobless and needed money. Keats was ill, treated with mercury for likely venereal disease. In late November, he left for Burford Bridge, completing Endymion.
Endymion responds to Shelley’s Alastor (1816), where a poet seeks an ideal mate, questing fruitlessly across the world, dying alone. Keats’s poem begins with Endymion, unhappy with pastoral delights, entranced by Cynthia, the moon goddess. After adventures, he abandons his quest, favoring an earthly Indian maid, revealed as Cynthia. The narrative is weak, but themes resonate: earthly love leads to the ideal, real and ideal merging through intense love, leading to “fellowship with essence.” The mortal-ideal love theme, and redemption from human suffering, would preoccupy Keats.
Endymion’s poetry varies wildly. Most of Keats’s circle, including himself, recognized its flaws. Yet, as a sustained work exploring serious concerns, reconsidering romance genre polarities, it was a career breakthrough.
Critical reaction to Endymion was infamously fierce. Reviews lacked the sensationalism of attacks on Keats, associated with Hunt and the “Cockney School.” Lockhart in Blackwood’s and Croker in Quarterly Review were most vicious, coolly satiric. Lockhart, aware of Keats’s background, saw the poem as another example of an upstart poet in an age where Burns and Baillie had “turned the heads of … farm-servants and unmarried ladies.” He attacked Poems (1817) and Endymion’s “imperturbable drivelling idiocy,” blaming Hunt, “the meanest, the filthiest, and the most vulgar of Cockney poetasters.” Croker in Quarterly couldn’t get past Book I, finding the diction and rhyme absurd.
Later, it was believed these attacks broke Keats and his health. Shelley exaggerated the impact. Byron was initially scornful, but refused public criticism after Keats’s death. Brown also spread the idea of a “death-blow.”
Keats was hurt but not crushed. The melodrama of Keats “snuffed out by an Article” is false. He showed no TB signs for another year, was not frail, and wasn’t overly sensitive to criticism. He wrote to Hessey, “My own domestic criticism has given me pain without comparison beyond what Blackwood or the Quarterly could possibly inflict…In Endymion, I leaped headlong into the Sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the Soundings, the quicksands, & the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore.”
Negative Capability and Aesthetic Philosophy
Keats had outgrown Endymion even before its completion. His association with Bailey in 1817 and Hazlitt’s lectures sharpened his aesthetic thinking. On November 22, 1817, he wrote Bailey the first of his letters on aesthetics, poetry’s social role, and his poetic mission. Rarely has a poet left such a record of his thoughts on his career and poetry’s history. The poet’s struggle to create beauty became a paradigm of spiritual quest to perceive the enduring in a world of suffering. For Keats, this quest was expressed through intense imaginative engagement with sensuous beauty: “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty.”
Imagination’s “sublime” activity is an intensification of experience. Criticizing a painting by Benjamin West, Keats wrote, “there is nothing to be intense upon; no women one feels mad to kiss; no face swelling into reality. the excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty & Truth—Examine King Lear & you will find this examplified throughout.” Art’s beauty intensity isn’t identical to life’s intensity, though Romantic theory tends to equate them. Keats emphasizes the artist’s aloofness from single perspectives because portraying life’s intensity reveals its dual nature and the precariousness of fixing or rationalizing it: “it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”
Keats’s Negative Capability implies engagement with the real through imaginative identification, simultaneously a transcendence. The artist loses selfhood demanding a single perspective, identifies with the experience of their object, and lets that experience speak through them. Both soul and world are transformed by dynamic openness. This transformation is art’s “truth,” its connection to human experience; its “beauty” is abstracting and universalizing enduring forms of heart’s desires.
Troubling questions remained, explored in letters and poetry: What does experiencing both intensity and essence beauty mean? Doesn’t the artist demand more from life than Negative Capability offers? Isn’t aesthetic distillation falsification, succumbing to enchantment? Is experience’s “truth” only that pain accompanies joy? Self-consciousness implies knowledge of loss and death; art may only deflect attention. In December 1817, Keats wrote “In drear-nighted December” on seasonal change bringing human sorrow, not nature’s. In January 1818, in “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again,” he resolved to leave “golden-tongued Romance” for tragic insight.
In winter 1817-1818, Keats returned to Shakespeare and Wordsworth, deepening aesthetic judgment, spurred by Hazlitt’s poetry lectures. He would challenge Hazlitt’s “gusto” and disinterestedness with questions. He heard Hazlitt say of Shakespeare a great poet “was nothing in himself: but he was all that others were, or that they could become…When he conceived of a character, whether real or imaginary, he not only entered into all its thoughts and feelings, but seemed instantly, and as if by touching a secret spring, to be surrounded with all the same objects.” In January 1818, he wrote his Shakespearean sonnet, “When I have fears that I may cease to be,” balancing sound, theme of time, death, and art.
In Hazlitt’s lectures, Keats heard praise and critique of Wordsworth’s naturalism, prompting self-reflection. In December 1817, he met Wordsworth through Haydon. At Haydon’s “Immortal Dinner,” Keats read his “Hymn to Pan,” Wordsworth calling it “a very pretty piece of Paganism.” Keats and friends felt condescension. Though not overly hurt, Keats saw Wordsworth several more times, recognizing Wordsworth’s poetic revolution, but fearing contemporary poetry risked “obtrusive” self-absorption. In February 1818, after visiting the Mermaid Tavern, he longed for “unobtrusive” beauty, “Let us have the old Poets, & Robin Hood.” He enclosed his “Lines on the Mermaid tavern,” and “[Robin Hood],” knowing modern context hindered unself-conscious grandeur.
For now, perplexed, his poetry slowed. He prepared Endymion for press. Winter was social, with Haydon, Hunts, Shelleys, theater. In early March, George arrived, leaving Tom ill. Keats went to Teignmouth, Devonshire, until May. With Tom ill, George immigrating, Keats felt obligated to stay away from London, fearing losing both brothers. Sad months, yet a time of introspection and transition, marking Keats’s emergence as a poet whose subject was romance’s difficulties, the genre emblematic of art’s transformative power.
Isabella and the Questioning of Romance
The romance he wrote in March 1818, Isabella, from Boccaccio, is uneven. Keats disliked it, but it’s an experiment in tone, between romantic tragedy and uneasy narration. A first attempt at poise between romance and disillusionment, later achieved in The Eve of St. Agnes. His March mood is reflected in a letter to Reynolds, containing “Dear Reynolds,” suspicious of “Imagination brought / Beyond its proper bound,” spoiling “the singing of the Nightingale.” He could no longer be uplifted by romance: “I saw too distinct into the core / Of an eternal fierce destruction.” He was uneasy with Isabella.
The Boccaccio story is simple: Isabella loves Lorenzo. Her brothers murder Lorenzo. Isabella discovers the body, exhumes the head, buries it in basil, and dies mad. Keats’s tone resists sentimentality, showing compassion for the victim, but lingering bizarrely on physical decay. Lamentations are excessive, bordering on humor. Keats dismissed Isabella as “mawkish,” revealing self-consciousness about romance in modern sensibility. Did this mean modern poets couldn’t write “vision” or “grandeur?”
This question challenged his career, addressed in a May 3, 1818, letter to Reynolds, crucial for understanding Keats’s mature thought. The letter assumes a “grand march of intellect,” arts advancing with knowledge, art and science easing “the Burden of the Mystery.” Like Hunt and Shelley, Keats was ambivalent about Wordsworth, whose genius expressed modern sensibility, but seemed too “circumscribed” for visionary myth. Keats questioned “whether Miltons apparently less anxiety for Humanity proceeds from his seeing further or no than Wordsworth: And whether Wordsworth has in truth epic passion, and martyrs himself to the human heart, the main region of his song.” Milton’s faith was easy; Wordsworth’s poetry had deeper potential depth, awakening the soul to suffering, though forced by history. Keats saw working through this challenge as his role.
While this conception of “modern” literature came from progressives, Keats brought his distrust of utopianism and sense of tragedy. His goal was aesthetic detachment transforming pathos into tragic vision, Negative Capability he felt Wordsworth lacked. He found Negative Capability through pain, not romance. Metaphorically, he described life as a “Mansion of Many Apartments, two of which I can only describe…—The first we step into we call the infant or thoughtless Chamber… From this state of innocence we are impelled into the “Chamber of Maiden-Thought,” where knowledge discloses “the World is full of Misery and Heart-break, Pain, Sickness and oppression,” and the chamber darkens. Wordsworth explored these chambers. “Now, if we live, and go on thinking, we too shall explore them.” Poetry’s potential outcome judged by experience, for “axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses.” The letter shows poetic “mission,” but equally Keats’s sense of poetry in his era questioning its own processes of interpreting experience.
Lake District and Scotland, Hyperion’s Genesis
He meditated on these matters through summer, though writing little. They became dominant concerns, visible in Hyperion, begun in October. In June, Tom seemed better, and Keats joined Brown on a walking tour of the Lake District and Scotland, hoping for travel to prepare him to write. The Lake District invigorated him. In evenings, Keats wrote journal letters to Tom filled with nature and purpose: “I shall learn poetry here,” he wrote, “and shall henceforth write more than ever…” In Scotland, rain and chill set in, and Keats developed a sore throat that lingered for months. Not TB-related, but recurring sore throats depressed him. Aware of family consumption history, and illness bouts, he didn’t believe these throats were dangerous or his career short-lived.
In early August, leaving Brown in Scotland, Keats returned to Hampstead to find Tom seriously ill with TB. In June, George had immigrated to America. Keats was alone with Tom until his death on December 1. Yet, throughout autumn 1818, he began his best work, Hyperion, even critics saw it as major.
Keats’s biographer Walter Jackson Bate called the year starting with Hyperion “the most productive in the life of any poet of the past three centuries.” An engagement with three centuries of literary convention, probing limits of epic, ode, pastoral, romance, realigning these forms with Keats’s modern sense of myth-history reciprocity, fantasy-experience, aspiration-disillusionment. This is Hyperion’s core, its fresh engagement with these issues around the fall of the mighty and hope for redemption. Hyperion tells of Titans’ fall, replaced by Gods, more beautiful through superior knowledge, and insight into human suffering.
The epic opens not with Titan-God battle, but aftermath. Opening lines are solemn: “Deep in the shady sadness of a vale / Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn, / Far from the fiery noon, and eve’s one star, / Sat grayhaired Saturn, quiet as a stone.” Fallen Saturnians are in a dark, still world. All but Hyperion have fallen; some hope he’ll revolt against Jove and prevent Apollo directing the sun. Like romantic epics, this begins with stasis, emotional confusion, pain, paralysis. Fallen Titans’ speeches are useless. Saturn is helpless; Thea grieves; Enceladus blusters; Oceanus sees history as ordered progress, leaving beauty for greater beauty. Hyperion tries to raise the sun, but falls back in grief. Apollo is born a god through painful tragic knowledge, and “with fierce convulse / Die[s] into life.” The fragment ends. Council of fallen Titans is from Milton’s Paradise Lost. Keats’s blank verse is “Miltonic,” but his verse, densely beautiful, with subtle assonances, and emphasis on verse line, differs from Miltonic syntax. Keats’s victims can’t define their plight or their fall. Their fall is cosmic, echoing Romantic era fascination with revolution, lost golden ages, demythologized modernity. Hyperion’s relevance to Keats’s modern poet concept is clear: Apollo’s radiance born from human suffering. Self-consciousness becomes redemptive if forming a poet’s soul, whose beauty creation is intense for transcending pain and lost faith.
The poem proved problematic, abandoned by April 1819. Keats’s attempt at “disinterested” sympathy with Hyperion and Apollo was challenged by personal elements in both. Apollo’s knowledge deifies him, Hyperion’s suffering is tragically compelling. Dramatic focus unclear. Nursing Tom, Keats felt Negative Capability’s difficulty, even impossibility facing Tom’s agony. What good is progress or poet’s birth facing such pain? This became Hyperion’s subject when revised as The Fall of Hyperion in summer 1819.
Fanny Brawne and the Great Odes
Keats spent autumn almost constantly with Tom, seeing few friends. On December 1, 1818, Tom’s death day, Charles Brown invited Keats to live with him at Wentworth Place. Brown rented his side to widow Mrs. Frances Brawne and her three children, including eighteen-year-old Fanny. They continued visiting the Dilkes at Wentworth. Here, likely in November, Keats met Fanny. This house, with Brown and the Brawnes next door, became Keats’s last real home.
Keats’s relationship with Fanny Brawne is captivating. Key aspects remain obscure. On December 25, 1818, they declared love; engaged in October 1819. Keats felt he couldn’t marry until established as a poet. Fanny’s feelings are unclear. Keats burned her letters, which were buried with him. She later married, lived abroad; her writings reveal little. Keats’s letters portray a lively, warm, fashionable young woman, respecting Keats’s vocation but not literary.
Keats’s letters to her are moving, demanding seriousness and attention from a sociable girl for a suffering, insecure, dying man seeking saving love. Judging Keats (or Fanny) by 1820 letters, written by a desperate, ill Keats, is wrong. Their relationship, conventionally for uncertain futures, was likely not sexual, but passionate and mutual, central to their intense feelings. To Fanny, he addressed “Bright Star,” copied by her in a Dante volume Keats gave her in April 1819, possibly written earlier. Even here, intensity isn’t simple: humans desire stars’ “stedfastness” only in “sweet unrest,” passion both intense and annihilating, a “swoon to death,” fulfilling but inhumanly “unchangeable.”
Keats explores these desire paradoxes in The Eve of St. Agnes, a Spenserian stanza romance written January 1819, recalling Romeo and Juliet. Story is less important than its transformation into a meditation on desire, dreams, romance. Framed by cold eternity, ancient Beadsman’s piety contrasts with revelry within. Heroine Madeline seeks dream husband on St. Agnes’ Eve. Porphyro, from a feuding clan, aided by nurse Angela, enters her room, fulfilling the dream, awakening her to his warm presence. Lovers flee into the storm. The poem shifts to a historical vision, the Beadsman dead.
Madeline’s awakening is crucial. Porphyro must awaken her, but fulfillment depends on merging with her dream. Consummation “is no dream,” Porphyro says, but Madeline fears betrayal. “Sweet dreamer!” he responds, “‘tis an elfin storm from faery land,” carrying her away. Hunt admired pictorial beauty, contrasts of warmth-chill, sensuality-religion. Today, we see it as balanced, self-aware, mediating between artifice-reality, dream-awakening. Waking life needs enchantment for fulfillment; yet dreaming is precarious.
This dialectical probing of enchantment, imagination seeking fulfillment, initiates Keats’s profound spring 1819 meditations. Enchantment’s dangers deepen in “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” written April 1819. A knight is seduced by a fairy-like woman, and warned by a dream of lost warriors. Awakening brings little comfort; he wanders “palely” in a charm-less world. Allegorical for Keats’s feelings for Fanny or poetry. More fundamentally, Keats’s sense of life’s dark ironies, evil-beauty, love-pain interwoven. Imagining beauty makes the world more painful, deepening art’s need.
The great odes of spring and fall—Ode to Psyche, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode on Melancholy, To Autumn—don’t answer these questions. They explore ironies of attempts to answer them. Ode to Psyche was written in late April, Ode to a Nightingale in May, To Autumn in September 1819. Odes represent Keats’s finest poetry, Romantic art’s greatest achievements.
The Psyche myth—mortal loved by Eros, deified after trials—was discussed in Peacock and Hunt’s circle. For Keats, Psyche, human spirit, becomes a goddess late, after older gods “faded.” In Ode to Psyche, the poet initially has a dream vision: Psyche and Eros making love. But for modern poets, visions aren’t unself-conscious. Christianity destroyed mythic nature relation. Perhaps humanist paganism was possible for a modern world of self-consciousness. Psyche, human soul, is deified “Too, too late for the fond believing lyre,” but may be made present through self-awareness. Her temple built “In some untrodden region of my mind,” prepared with “branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain.” The poem moves from spontaneous vision to hope for Psyche’s return in prepared consciousness. While Apuleius’s Psyche met Eros in darkness, Keats provides “A bright torch, and a casement ope at night, / To let the warm Love in!” Ode to Psyche relates to Keats’s modern poet concept, for whom Christian faith no longer justifies suffering. Nature, erotic love, and self-consciousness can produce mature art: “Do you see not how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul?”
Despite conclusion, Ode to Psyche starts with a question, ends with hope. Unself-conscious vision can only be invoked expectantly. Art providing middle ground between gods and humanity is questioned in Ode on a Grecian Urn and Ode to a Nightingale. Ode to a Nightingale, written rapidly, starts not with vision, but dull pain, “ache” of emptiness. Birdsong doesn’t simply inspire. Instead, a troubled meditation on imagination transforming soul.
In Ode to a Nightingale, the poet flees “weariness, the fever, and the fret,” of tragic existence, through intoxication, then “on the viewless wings of Poesy.” In the middle, the mind transcends life, lost in “embalmed darkness,” suggesting death, not escape. But the nightingale’s song is immortal, belonging to “ancient days.” “Forlorn” shocks the poet into awareness. Imagined “long ago” becomes “sad.” The bird flies off, “the fancy cannot cheat so well / As she is fam’d to do… Was it a vision or a waking dream? / Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?” The poem dismantles its own illusion.
The illusion: imagination creates permanence, transcending mind’s fleeting sensations. But imagination needs temporality. It tantalizes with eternal beauty. But no experience possible apart from time and change. Imagination falsifies. Art redeems experience in profound self-comprehension, paradoxes of nature. Expecting more invites open questions. In Ode on a Grecian Urn, this is explored through pictorial art, a timeless rendering of a human scene.
Ode on a Grecian Urn is heavily analyzed. No specific urn is known, but Keats drew a vase from Musée Napoléon. The poem imagines an artwork as permanence image. Though depicting passion, the urn remains “still unravish’d bride of quietness.” Probing pictorial art’s timelessness is the speaker’s action, seeking meaning. Poetry, unlike painting, creates meaning sequentially. The poet imagines a narrative: “Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave / Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare.” A moment of eternal consummation: “More happy love! more happy, happy love! / For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d, / For ever panting, and for ever young….” Repeated “happy” reveals strained paradox. Human happiness needs fulfillment in process and loss. Lovers “forever panting,” outside temporal process is a contradiction. Questions reveal questioner’s artifice, not urn’s truth.
In stanza four, the poet imagines a deserted town whose people provided urn images, now forever silent, dead. Like the Nightingale ode, timeless realm ends in desolation, absence of life. “Cold pastoral!” and puns on “brede” and “overwrought” reveal the paradox. Then, debated lines, the urn’s speech to suffering mankind, “ ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Interpreted as awkward intrusion or absolute aestheticism transforming pain. Critical debate shows poem’s dramatic richness, for the poet imagines a response from the urn’s eternal perspective, riddling from the human perspective.
In Ode on Melancholy, the subject is intense experience itself. Melancholy is desire and fulfillment’s logic. Intense pleasure shades to loss pain, fulfillment more intense as ephemeral. Keats’s thinking matured from Endymion’s sensation-as-transcendence poet. Maturing irony became re-evaluation of earlier concerns, art-imagination relation to experience. Odes show formal mastery: rhyme, puns, vowel sounds, form embodying conflicting thoughts.
Ode on Melancholy’s desire paradox emerges from experience and meditation. By May 1819, Keats’s Fanny Brawne relationship strained, intensifying frustration at inability to provide for her. He felt he couldn’t have a normal life while his career, health, were uncertain. June brought financial pressures. Keats considered abandoning poetry, returned books, thought of surgery at sea. Brown persuaded one more publishing attempt. In July, he went to Shanklin, Isle of Wight, with James Rice, for his last writing session.
Last Works and Legacy
Keats was ill that summer, letters to Fanny became jealous. But he wrote furiously, working on Otho the Great, a tragedy for money, and completing Lamia, his last full-length poem.
Lamia’s plot came from Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. The treatment, ironic, is Keats’s own. Lycius loves witch Lamia, presented sympathetically. She leads him to an enchanted castle. At their wedding, Lamia withers under philosopher Apollonius’s gaze, and Lycius dies. Issues recall The Eve of St. Agnes, but here the balance of enchantment / harsh reality is direct. Sympathies divided between rational and enchanted, feelings about Lamia divided. To many, ironies imply bitterness about love. Keats sought to present the story without sentimentality.
Keats sought resolution. He returned to Hyperion, justifying the poet’s life as self-conscious and imaginative. The Fall of Hyperion, a Dantesque vision, is his most ambitious attempt to understand imaginative aspiration. Poet led by Moneta, goddess of knowledge, to painful suffering awareness that deified Apollo. Moneta challenges the poet with fears that imagination is misery source, illusions causing pain. If so, romantic imagination is a snare. Better to remain a laborer for human good. But while poets aren’t as exalted as reformers, “a poet is a sage; / A humanist, physician to all men.” Moneta distinguishes poets from “dreamers.” True poets awaken imagination to pain, redeeming sorrow with acceptance. Yet, the climax, the poet parting Moneta’s veils, reveals a withered face of dying, unredeemed tragic knowledge. Darker than Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion achieves no resolutions, presenting Keats’s tragic vision and fragile hope for redemptive imagination.
The Fall of Hyperion and To Autumn summarize Keats’s career. To Autumn, written September 19, 1819, in Winchester, inspired by a walk, is Keats’s most perfect poem. Tone is acceptance of process, setting human time within nature’s cycles. Speaker never appears, only calming presence. Three stanzas move through ripening, reaping, gleaning, pressing, to “soft-dying day” with sounds of lambs and birds. Richness of sound creates ripeness intensity. Intensity, unlike in Ode to Melancholy, doesn’t end in extinction. Subjectivity avoided; season mythologized as part of yearly rhythms. Final stanza recalls loss feeling: “Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?” But soothes, “Think not of them, thou hast thy music too.” No loss without recompense, in nature’s comic, renewing power. Final lines give intense present gathering past and future. Mythological vision and experience achieve balance within nature.
This poem marked Keats’s poetic career’s end. He saw his new volume, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems published in July 1820. Praise from Hunt, Shelley, Lamb was enthusiastic. Jeffrey praised the new poems and Endymion. Reviews became respectful. The volume sold steadily. But by summer 1820, Keats was too ill to be encouraged.
Keats’s last year is sad. In winter 1819, he considered abandoning poetry. He was confused, depressed, worried about money, desperate about Fanny. He became openly engaged around October. His health and mind worsened. He nearly stopped publishing. Then, in February 1820, lung hemorrhage convinced him he was dying. He would live little more than a year.
Despite remissions, he continued hemorrhaging. Friends were shaken, but there were hopes for recovery. In early summer, he lived alone in Kentish Town, near the Hunts. Living alone, fearful, restless, trying to separate from Fanny, he worsened. The Hunts took him in. He often walked past his last home with his brothers. Once, he wept, “dying of a broken heart.” He quarreled with the Hunts, returned to Well Walk, and was taken in by Fanny and Mrs. Brawne, nursed in their home. Advised to winter in Italy, he left for Rome in November 1820, with Joseph Severn, who nursed him until his death. They took rooms on Piazza di Spagna. Keats walked, rode, tried to keep spirits up, concerned for Severn. In last weeks, he suffered terribly, hoping for death. Too pained to read letters, especially from Fanny, believing frustrated love contributed to illness. He asked Severn to bury her letters with him. He thought of friends and brothers. His last letter, November 30, 1820, asks Brown to write his brother, and “to my sister—who walks about my imagination like a ghost—she is so like Tom. I can scarcely bid you good bye even in a letter. I always made an awkward bow. / God bless you! / John Keats.”
On February 23, 1821, Keats died in Severn’s arms. His last words comforted Severn: “Severn—lift me up—I am dying—I shall die easy—don’t be frightened—be firm, and thank God it has come!” He was buried in the Protestant Cemetery. He requested no name, only “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” Severn and Brown added: “This Grave contains all that was Mortal of a YOUNG ENGLISH POET, Who on his Death Bed in the Bitterness of his Heart at the Malicious Power of his Enemies, Desired these Words to be engraven on his Tomb Stone.” Brown later regretted the addition.
Keats’s dying fears of obscurity were wrong. Even in 1820 and 1821, there were positive notices. His friends collected materials and published memoirs. Hunt wrote biographical sketches. The Poetical Works of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats (1829) contained a memoir from Hunt.
Crucial to Keats’s reputation was Richard Monckton Milnes’s 1848 biography, Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats, widely read and respected. Keats was seen as Shelley and Byron’s equal.
By 1853, Matthew Arnold could speak of Keats as “in the school of Shakespeare.” Victorians admired his lush imagery, reflected in Pre-Raphaelite paintings and poets like Tennyson and Swinburne. In 1857, Alexander Smith proclaimed Keats highly influential.
Keats evoked warm feelings in those who knew him. No one who met Keats didn’t admire him. Close friends remained devoted to his memory. “On his deathbed… his greatest pleasure had been the watching the growth of flowers,” Severn remembered. “There was a strong bias of the beautiful side of humanity in every thing he did.”
“I have lov’d the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remembered,” Keats wrote to Fanny Brawne in 1820. In Keats’s work, aesthetic form struggle reflects meaning struggle against experience limits. His art embodies conflicts of mortality and desire. His poetry’s urgency stems from his love of beauty and tragic life. Keats approached experience, imagination, art, and illusion with thoughtfulness, delighting in beauty revealing truth.
The grave of John Keats in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, featuring his self-chosen epitaph “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water,” a poignant reflection on his life and perceived fleeting fame.
