About john keats biography and works

Then, in February of , Keats came down with symptoms of tuberculosis. Fanny nursed him as much as she could. Despite his severe illness, he tried to finish his final poems, and ultimately got outstanding reviews on his poems. However, already heartbroken and depressed, Keats gave up writing due to deteriorating health, and sailed to Italy with his friend Joseph Severn for treatment.

But he did not survive and passed away on February 23, He was buried in Rome. Keats published his first collections of poems in March , in which he used a bold and daring writing style. The most damning of those pieces had come from Blackwood's, whose piece, "On the Cockney School of Poetry," shook Keats and made him nervous to publish "Endymion.

Keats' hesitation was warranted. Upon its publication the lengthy poem received a lashing from the more conventional poetry community. One critic called the work, the "imperturbable driveling idiocy of Endymion. How much of an effect this criticism had on Keats is uncertain, but it is clear that he did take notice of it. But Shelley's later accounts of how the criticism destroyed the young poet and led to his declining health, however, have been refuted.

Keats in fact, had already moved beyond "Endymion" even before it was published. By the end of , he was reexamining poetry's role in society. In lengthy letters to friends, Keats outlined his vision of a kind of poetry that drew its beauty from real world human experience rather than some mythical grandeur. Keats was also formulating the thinking behind his most famous doctrine, Negative Capability , which is the idea that humans are capable of transcending intellectual or social constraints and far exceed, creatively or intellectually, what human nature is thought to allow.

In effect Keats was responding to his critics, and conventional thinking in general, which sought to squeeze the human experience into a closed system with tidy labels and rational relationships. Keats saw a world more chaotic, more creative than what others he felt, would permit. In the summer of , Keats took a walking tour in Northern England and Scotland.

He returned home later that year to care for his brother, Tom, who'd fallen deeply ill with tuberculosis. Keats, who around this time fell in love with a woman named Fanny Brawne, continued to write. He'd proven prolific for much of the past year. His work included his first Shakespearean sonnet, "When I have fears that I may cease to be," which was published in January Two months later, Keats published "Isabella," a poem that tells the story of a woman who falls in love with a man beneath her social standing, instead of the man her family has chosen her to marry.

The work was based on a story from Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio, and it's one Keats himself would grow to dislike. His work also included the beautiful "To Autumn," a sensuous work published in that describes ripening fruit, sleepy workers, and a maturing sun. The poem, and others, demonstrated a style Keats himself had crafted all his own, one that was filled with more sensualities than any contemporary Romantic poetry.

Keats' writing also revolved around a poem he called "Hyperion," an ambitious Romantic piece inspired by Greek myth that told the story of the Titans' despondency after their losses to the Olympians. On 1 October the ship landed at Lulworth Bay or Holworth Bay, where the two went ashore; back on board ship he made the final revisions of "Bright Star".

The journey was a minor catastrophe: storms broke out, followed by a dead calm that slowed the ship's progress. When they finally docked in Naples, the ship was held in quarantine for ten days due to a suspected outbreak of cholera in Britain. Keats reached Rome on 14 November, by which time any hope of the warmer climate he sought had disappeared.

Keats wrote his last letter on 30 November to Charles Armitage Brown; "Tis the most difficult thing in the world to me to write a letter. My stomach continues so bad, that I feel it worse on opening any book — yet I am much better than I was in Quarantine. Then I am afraid to encounter the proing and conning of any thing interesting to me in England.

I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence". Despite care from Severn and Dr. James Clark , his health rapidly deteriorated. The medical attention Keats received may have hastened his death. Clark eventually diagnosed consumption tuberculosis and placed Keats on a starvation diet of an anchovy and a piece of bread a day intended to reduce the blood flow to his stomach.

He also bled the poet: a standard treatment of the day, but also likely a significant contributor to Keats's weakness. Severn's biographer Sue Brown writes: "They could have used opium in small doses, and Keats had asked Severn to buy a bottle of opium when they were setting off on their voyage. What Severn didn't realise was that Keats saw it as a possible resource if he wanted to commit suicide.

He tried to get the bottle from Severn on the voyage but Severn wouldn't let him have it. Then in Rome he tried again Severn was in such a quandary he didn't know what to do, so in the end he went to the doctor, who took it away. As a result Keats went through dreadful agonies with nothing to ease the pain at all. He repeatedly demanded, "How long is this posthumous existence of mine to go on?

The first months of marked a slow and steady decline into the final stage of tuberculosis. His autopsy showed his lung almost disintegrated. Severn nursed him devotedly and observed in a letter how Keats would sometimes cry upon waking to find himself still alive. Severn writes,. Keats raves till I am in a complete tremble for him [ 72 ] The phlegm seem'd boiling in his throat, and increased until eleven, when he gradually sank into death, so quiet, that I still thought he slept.

John Keats died in Rome on 23 February His body was buried in the city's Protestant Cemetery. His last request was to be placed under a tombstone bearing no name or date, only the words, "Here lies One whose Name was writ in Water. Severn and Brown added their lines to the stone in protest at the critical reception of Keats's work. Hunt blamed his death on the Quarterly Review ' s scathing attack of "Endymion".

As Byron quipped in his narrative poem Don Juan ;. Seven weeks after the funeral, Shelley memorialised Keats in his poem Adonais. For public health reasons, the Italian health authorities burnt the furniture in Keats's room, scraped the walls and made new windows, doors and flooring. On the site today, Marsh wrote, "In the old part of the graveyard, barely a field when Keats was buried here, there are now umbrella pines, myrtle shrubs, roses, and carpets of wild violets".

When Keats died at 25, he had been writing poetry seriously for only about six years, from until the summer of , and publishing for only four. In his lifetime, sales of Keats's three volumes of poetry probably amounted to only copies. Agnes and other poems was published in July before his last visit to Rome. The compression of his poetic apprenticeship and maturity into so short a time is just one remarkable aspect of Keats's work.

Although prolific during his short career, and now one of the most studied and admired British poets, his reputation rests on a small body of work, centred on the Odes , [ 80 ] and only in the creative outpouring of the last years of his short life was he able to express the inner intensity for which he has been lauded since his death. Aware that he was dying, he wrote to Fanny Brawne in February , "I have left no immortal work behind me — nothing to make my friends proud of my memory — but I have lov'd the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember'd.

Keats's ability and talent was acknowledged by several influential contemporary allies such as Shelley and Hunt. Seven weeks after the funeral he wrote Adonais , a despairing elegy, [ 84 ] stating that Keats's early death was a personal and public tragedy:. The loveliest and the last, The bloom, whose petals nipped before they blew Died on the promise of the fruit.

Although Keats wrote that "if poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all," poetry did not come easily to him; his work was the fruit of a deliberate and prolonged classical self-education. He may have possessed an innate poetic sensibility, but his early works were clearly those of a young man learning his craft.

His first attempts at verse were often vague, languorously narcotic and lacking a clear eye. Hunt scorned the Augustan or "French" school dominated by Pope and attacked earlier Romantic poets Wordsworth and Coleridge, now in their forties, as unsophisticated, obscure and crude writers.

About john keats biography and works

During Keats's few years as a published poet, the reputation of the older Romantic school was at its lowest ebb. Keats came to echo these sentiments in his work, identifying himself with a "new school" for a time, somewhat alienating him from Wordsworth, Coleridge and Byron and providing a basis for scathing attacks from Blackwood's and the Quarterly Review.

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-eaves 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.

By his death, Keats had therefore been associated with the taints of both old and new schools: the obscurity of first-wave Romantics and uneducated affectation of Hunt's "Cockney School". Keats's posthumous reputation mixed the reviewers' caricature of the simplistic bumbler with the image of a hyper-sensitive genius killed by high feeling, which Shelley later portrayed.

The Victorian sense of poetry as the work of indulgence and luxuriant fancy offered a schema into which Keats was posthumously fitted. Marked as the standard-bearer of sensory writing, his reputation grew steadily and remarkably. In , twenty-seven years after Keats's death, Richard Monckton Milnes published the first full biography, which helped place Keats within the canon of English literature.

Agnes", "Isabella" and "La Belle Dame sans Merci", lush, arresting and popular images which remain closely associated with Keats's work. Ridley said the ode "is the most serenely flawless poem in our language. The largest collection of the letters, manuscripts, and other papers of Keats is in the Houghton Library at Harvard University.

Since the British Keats-Shelley Memorial Association have annually awarded a prize for romantic poetry. Jorge Luis Borges named his first encounter with Keats an experience he felt all his life. None of Keats's biographies were written by people who had known him. Leigh Hunt's Lord Byron and some of his Contemporaries gives the first biographical account, strongly emphasising Keats's supposedly humble origins, a misconception which still continues.

However, early accounts often gave contradictory or biased versions of events and were subject to dispute. These early writings coloured all subsequent biography and have become embedded in a body of Keats legend. Shelley promoted Keats as someone whose achievement could not be separated from agony, who was 'spiritualised' by his decline and too fine-tuned to endure the harshness of life; the consumptive, suffering image popularly held today.

The idealised image of the heroic romantic poet who battled poverty and died young was inflated by the late arrival of an authoritative biography and the lack of an accurate likeness. Most of the surviving portraits of Keats were painted after his death, and those who knew him held that they did not succeed in capturing his unique quality and intensity.

It was directed by John Barnes. Poet Laureate Simon Armitage wrote "'I speak as someone It was first published in The Times on 20 February Keats's letters were first published in and Critics in the 19th century disregarded them as distractions from his poetic works, [ ] but in the 20th century they became almost as admired and studied as his poetry, [ 43 ] and are highly regarded in the canon of English literary correspondence.

Eliot called them "certainly the most notable and most important ever written by any English poet. Keats spent much time considering poetry itself, its constructs and impacts, displaying a deep interest unusual in his milieu, who were more easily distracted by metaphysics or politics, fashions or science. Eliot wrote of Keats's conclusions; "There is hardly one statement of Keats' about poetry which Few of Keats's letters remain from the period before he joined his literary circle.

From spring , however, there is a rich record of his prolific and impressive letter-writing skills. They glitter with humour and critical intelligence. When his brother George went to America, Keats wrote to him in detail, the body of letters becoming "the real diary" and self-revelation of Keats's life, as well as an exposition of his philosophy, with the first drafts of poems containing some of Keats's finest writing and thought.

Keats also reflected on the background and composition of his poetry. Specific letters often coincide with or anticipate the poems they describe. What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion [chameleon] Poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation.

A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity — he is continually in for — and filling some other Body — The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute — the poet has none; no identity — he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God's Creatures.

A temperate sharpness about it I never lik'd the stubbled fields as much as now — Aye, better than the chilly green of spring. Somehow the stubble plain looks warm — in the same way as some pictures look warm — this struck me so much in my Sunday's walk that I composed upon it". 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; [ 88 ].

He became engaged to Fanny Brawne, but with no money there was little prospect of them marrying. Early in , Keats began to display symptoms of tuberculosis. His second volume of poetry was published in July, but he was by now very ill. In September, Keats and his friend Joseph Severn left for the warmer weather of Italy, in the hope that this would improve Keats' health.

When they reached Rome, Keats was confined to bed. Severn nursed him devotedly, but Keats died in Rome on 23 February He was buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. Search term:.