John Keats

John Keats: Six Odes and Twenty-Five Years

On 3 February 1820, John Keats coughed blood onto his sheets, examined it with the eye of a man who had trained at Guy's Hospital, and told his friend Charles Armitage Brown: "That drop of blood is my death warrant." He was right. He had one year left, and he had already written the poems that would make him, by general consent, the most purely gifted English poet after Shakespeare to die before thirty.

An Orphan of Moorgate

He arrived on 31 October 1795 in Moorgate, London, the eldest of the four surviving children of Thomas and Frances Keats — followed by George, Tom, and Frances Mary, known as Fanny. The family was not literary and not grand, and it came apart fast. His father died in April 1804 of a skull fracture after falling from his horse. His mother died of tuberculosis in March 1810. The children passed to their grandmother, Alice Jennings, and to two appointed guardians, the tea broker Richard Abbey and John Sandell.

From the summer of 1803 Keats attended John Clarke's progressive school at Enfield, and it was there that the one piece of decisive good luck in his life occurred: the headmaster's son, Charles Cowden Clarke, took an interest in him and put Tasso, Spenser and Chapman's Homer into his hands. That reading list is essentially the whole foundation of Keats's art.

Guy's Hospital

Abbey pulled him out of school at fifteen and apprenticed him, in the autumn of 1810, to the surgeon Thomas Hammond. He served until 1813. In October 1815 he registered as a medical student at Guy's Hospital and was made a dresser within a month — a serious clinical post, hands inside other people's bodies. He qualified, receiving his apothecary's licence in 1816, and then declined to practise. He had decided to write poetry instead. The decision looks romantic; it was in fact a bet made by a young man with no money and no patron, against the advice of everyone managing his affairs.

The Cockney Poet They Tried to Bury

His first surviving poem, "An Imitation of Spenser," dates from 1814. In May 1816 Leigh Hunt printed the sonnet "O Solitude" in *The Examiner*, and in October the two men met. Hunt's circle gave Keats access to Shelley and Wordsworth and produced *Poems by John Keats* in the spring of 1817. It went almost unnoticed. He moved to the publishers Taylor and Hessey, who believed in him.

Then came *Endymion* in 1818, and the reviewers fell on it. John Wilson Croker savaged it in the *Quarterly Review*. John Gibson Lockhart, in *Blackwood's*, called it "imperturbable drivelling idiocy" and advised the author to go back to the pharmacy counter. The attacks were partly literary and partly snobbery about a surgeon's apprentice with the wrong accent writing in the manner of gentlemen. They did not stop him. What happened next is one of the fastest maturations in literature.

Wentworth Place, Spring 1819

His brother Tom died of tuberculosis on 1 December 1818; Keats had nursed him, and almost certainly caught the disease doing it. Within months, living at Wentworth Place in Hampstead, he wrote the odes. "Ode to Psyche," "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and "Ode on Melancholy" came in a concentrated burst across April and May 1819, with "To Autumn" completing the sequence later the same year. Brown recorded that the "Nightingale" was written under a plum tree in the garden. Keats also drove at the epic, producing the fragment "Hyperion" and then recasting it as "The Fall of Hyperion," which stayed unpublished until 1856. His contemporaries thought "Hyperion" his best thing.

Fanny Brawne

He met Frances Brawne in the autumn of 1818, and in April 1819 she moved into Wentworth Place, which put her on the other side of a wall. He gave her the sonnet "Bright Star." They were never able to marry: his health was collapsing and his finances never recovered from the failure of his books. The correspondence between them is among the most painful documents in English literature, written by a man who could diagnose his own prognosis.

Negative Capability and the Letters

Keats's letters are not a footnote to the poetry; T. S. Eliot judged them "certainly the most notable and most important ever written by any English poet." Their central bequest is a phrase he coined almost in passing: *negative capability*, the condition of being "capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason." It is a description of the temperament required to write his kind of poem — one that holds beauty and death in the same hand without resolving them — and it has since been borrowed by critics, psychoanalysts and philosophers who have never read *Endymion*.

Why John Is Called a Genius

The faculty in question is sensuous compression: the ability to make an abstract idea arrive through the body, so that a reader thinks a thought about mortality by way of a taste, a weight, a temperature. No English poet packs more physical sensation per line, and almost none makes it do so much intellectual work. That he acquired this at twenty-three, four years after leaving a surgical dressing job, with almost no formal literary education, is the fact that makes the word hard to avoid.

Serious people have used it. Shelley wrote *Adonais* within seven weeks of the funeral. Francis Jeffrey, Hunt and Shelley all championed the 1820 volume. By 1888 the *Encyclopædia Britannica* was calling "Ode to a Nightingale" one of the final masterpieces of the language, and Eliot's verdict on the letters still stands.

The counter-case deserves stating. The output is tiny and wildly uneven. *Poems* (1817) is apprentice work. *Endymion* is genuinely slack and diffuse; Lockhart was a bully and a snob, but he was not hallucinating a flaw. The epic Keats wanted to write, he never finished — twice. His mature reputation rests on perhaps half a dozen poems and a bundle of letters, and it has been inflated by a myth: the beautiful doomed boy killed by bad reviews, a story Shelley helped invent and which is medically false. Strip the myth away and the achievement is still extraordinary. But it is a small, concentrated achievement, not a large one, and honesty requires saying that the promise was greater than the delivery because he ran out of time.

Legacy

He sailed for Rome with the painter Joseph Severn in September 1820, arriving on 14 November. His last letter, on 30 November, contains the sentence "I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past." He died there on 23 February 1821, aged twenty-five, and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery under an epitaph he chose himself: "Here lies One whose Name was writ in Water." It was a bitter joke about failure, and it turned out to be the least accurate line he ever wrote. Within a century he had been absorbed into the core of the English canon, where the Pre-Raphaelites, Tennyson, Wilde and Eliot all drew on him, and where he has stayed.

Achievements

• Educated at King's College London
• Worked as poet, judge-rapporteur and physician