The parents of John Keats were Thomas Keats, and Frances, daughter of
Mr. Jennings, who kept a large livery-stable, the Swan and Hoop, in the
Pavement, Moorfields, London. Thomas Keats was the principal stableman
or assistant in the same business. John, a seven months' child, was born
at the Swan and Hoop on 31 October, 1795. Three other children grew
up--George, Thomas, and Fanny, John is said to have been violent and
ungovernable in early childhood. He was sent to a very well-reputed
school, that of the Rev. John Clarke, at Enfield: the son Charles Cowden
Clarke, whom I have previously mentioned, was an undermaster, and paid
particular attention to Keats. The latter did not show any remarkable
talent at school, but learned easily, and was 'a very orderly scholar,'
acquiring a fair amount of Latin but no Greek. He was active,
pugnacious, and popular among his school-fellows. The father died of a
fall from his horse in April, 1804: the mother, after re-marrying,
succumbed to consumption in February, 1810. Before the close of the same
year John left school, and he was then apprenticed, to a surgeon at
Edmonton. In July, 1815, he passed with credit the examination at
Apothecaries' Hall.
In 1812 Keats read for the first time Spenser's _Faery Queen_, and was
fascinated with it to a singular degree. This and other poetic reading
made him flag in his surgical profession, and finally he dropped it, and
for the remainder of his life had no definite occupation save that of
writing verse. From his grandparents he inherited a certain moderate sum
of money--not more than sufficient to give him a tolerable start in
life. He made acquaintance with Leigh Hunt, then editor of the
_Examiner_, John Hunt, the publisher, Charles Wentworth Dilke who became
editor of the _Athenaeum_, the painter Haydon, and others. His first
volume of Poems (memorable for little else than the sonnet _On Reading
Chapman's Homer_) was published in 1817. It was followed by _Endymion_
in April, 1818.
In June of the same year Keats set off with his chief intimate, Charles
Armitage Brown (a retired Russia merchant who afterwards wrote a book on
Shakespeare's Sonnets), on a pedestrian tour in Scotland, which extended
into North Ireland as well. In July, in the Isle of Mull, he got a bad
sore throat, of which some symptoms had appeared also in earlier years:
it may be regarded as the beginning of his fatal malady. He cut short
his tour and returned to Hampstead, where he had to nurse his younger
brother Tom, a consumptive invalid, who died in December of the same
year.
At the house of the Dilkes, in the autumn of 1818, Keats made the
acquaintance of Miss Fanny Brawne, the orphan daughter of a gentleman of
independent means: he was soon desperately in love with her, having 'a
swooning admiration of her beauty:' towards the spring of 1819 they
engaged to marry, with the prospect of a long engagement. On the night
of 3 February, 1820, on returning to the house at Hampstead which he
shared with Mr. Brown, the poet had his first attack, a violent one, of
blood-spitting from the lungs. He rallied somewhat, but suffered a
dangerous relapse in June, just prior to the publication of his final
volume, containing all his best poems--_Isabella, Hyperion, the Eve of
St. Agnes, Lamia_, and the leading Odes. His doctor ordered him off, as
a last chance, to Italy; previously to this he had been staying in the
house of Mrs. and Miss Brawne, who tended him affectionately. Keats was
now exceedingly unhappy. His passionate love, his easily roused feelings
of jealousy of Miss Brawne, and of suspicious rancour against even the
most amicable and attached of his male intimates, the general
indifference and the particular scorn and ridicule with which his poems
had been received, his narrow means and uncertain outlook, and the
prospect of an early death closing a painful and harassing illness--all
preyed upon his mind with unrelenting tenacity. The worst of all was the
sense of approaching and probably final separation from Fanny Brawne.
On 18 September, 1820, he left England for Italy, in company with Mr.
Joseph Severn, a student of painting in the Royal Academy, who, having
won the gold medal, was entitled to spend three years abroad for
advancement in his art. They travelled by sea to Naples; reached that
city late in October; and towards the middle of November went on to
Rome. Here Keats received the most constant and kind attention from Dr.
(afterwards Sir James) Clark. But all was of no avail: after continual
and severe suffering, devotedly watched by Severn, he expired on 23
February, 1821. He was buried in the old Protestant Cemetery of Rome,
under a little altar-tomb sculptured with a Greek lyre. His name was
inscribed, along with the epitaph which he himself had composed in the
bitterness of his soul, 'Here lies one whose name was writ in water.'
Keats was an undersized man, little more than five feet high. His face
was handsome, ardent, and full of expression; the hair rich, brown, and
curling; the hazel eyes 'mellow and glowing--large, dark, and
sensitive.' He was framed for enjoyment; but with that acuteness of
feeling which turned even enjoyment into suffering, and then again
extracted a luxury out of melancholy. He had vehemence and generosity,
and the frankness which belongs to these qualities, not unmingled,
however, with a strong dose of suspicion. Apart from the overmastering
love of his closing years, his one ambition was to be a poet. His mind
was little concerned either with the severe practicalities of life, or
with the abstractions of religious faith.
His poems, consisting of three successive volumes, have been already
referred to here. The first volume, the _Poems_ of 1817, is mostly of a
juvenile kind, containing only scattered suggestions of rich endowment
and eventual excellence. _Endymion_ is lavish and profuse, nervous and
languid, the wealth of a prodigal scattered in largesse of baubles and
of gems. The last volume--comprising the _Hyperion_--is the work of a
noble poetic artist, powerful and brilliant both in imagination and in
expression. Of the writings published since their author's death, the
only one of first-rate excellence is the fragmentary _Eve of St. Mark_.
There is also the drama of _Otho the Great_, written in co-operation
with Armitage Brown; and in Keats's letters many admirable thoughts are
admirably worded.
As to the relations between Shelley and Keats, I have to refer back to
the preceding memoir of Shelley.