John Keats
(1795–1821)

John Keats is a poet of rare genius—his astonishing development as a poet has few parallels in history. When Keats died in his mid-twenties, his poetic achievements far outstripped the accomplishments of Chaucer, Shakespeare, or Milton at the same age. During a brief career, he struggled against formidable obstacles to reach, as he told his friend Richard Woodhouse, "as high a summit in poetry as the nerve bestowed upon me will suffer."

The eldest son of a livery stable manager, Keats was born in 1795 in London. His father died in a riding accident when he was eight, and Keats's mother died six years later from tuberculosis, the disease that would eventually claim the poet's own life and that of his brother Tom. In 1810, Keats was apprenticed to an apothecary (pharmacist), and five years later he began medical studies, receiving his license in 1816. In that year, however, he decided to abandon medicine for poetry.

Keats's early poetry reveals the influence of Edmund Spenser, whose lyrical style and vivid imagery had a lasting impact on him. In 1817, Keats published his first collection of poems, which was well reviewed but sold few copies. In this year as well, Keats worked intensively on his first long poem, entitled Endymion: A Poetic Romance. Like many of his mature works, Endymion was inspired by ancient Greek mythology. In this period, Keats quickly became known in London literary circles, largely thanks to introductions from his older friend, the poet Leigh Hunt.

From the start of his career, Keats had been strongly attracted to the sonnet, the hymn, and the ode. In 1819, he wrote most of his great odes, as well as The Eve of St. Agnes, "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," the first part of Lamia, and The Fall of Hyperion. Keats produced this steady stream of masterpieces despite the toll taken on him by bitter critical attacks on Endymion and by his brother Tom's illness and death in late 1818. During the winter of 1819, he fell passionately in love with Fanny Brawne, to whom he became engaged.

Even before his great burst of creative activity, Keats had been troubled by frequent sore throats. During 1820 his illness progressed, and he was emotionally torn by the poverty that seemed to rule out any marriage to Fanny. Together with a friend, Keats traveled to Italy in hopes of recovering his health. They settled in Rome, where Keats died in February 1821.

The following features are often singled out as typical of Keats's poetic style:

• slow-moving, expansive rhythms
• eloquent but concentrated diction and phrasing
• concreteness of sensory imagery, sometimes involving synesthesia, or an appeal to more than one sense in the same image
• a tone of vibrant empathy, which leads the poet to identify intensely with the world outside himself

The mythology, literature, art, and sculpture of ancient Greece provided Keats with one of his principal sources of poetic inspiration. In 1816, the acquisition and display of the Elgin Marbles by the British Museum had a notable impact on the British public and on Keats, in particular. These sculptures and architectural ornaments had been removed from the Parthenon and other monuments in Athens and shipped to England by order of Thomas Bruce, Lord Elgin, who served as British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1799 to 1803. Elgin claimed he acted out of fear that the priceless artworks would be damaged if they were left in Greece, but many attacked him for dishonesty and vandalism. One of his most outspoken critics, in fact, was Lord Byron, another Romantic poet. Today, the Elgin Marbles remain a sore point between Britain and Greece, which has frequently demanded their return.

The most famous of the monuments is the Parthenon frieze, a continuous band inside the temple's colonnade whose sculptures depict a solemn religious procession and a mythological battle. Many of the Parthenon sculptures are the work of the Athenian Phidias (born ca. 490 B.C.), to whom Keats refers in line 10 of "Ode on Indolence."

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