Keats Shelly House - John Keats

Though he became the epitome of the young, beautiful, doomed poet of English Romanticism, Keats struck everyone who knew him with his tremendous energy, robust good humour, and zest for living. Born the son of a stables manager from the East End of London he had lost both parents by the age of 14, his mother to tuberculosis. He left school shortly after and trained as an apothecary. He later embarked on the study of surgery but in 1816, in spite of precarious finances, he gave up medicine for poetry. In 1816 he also met Leigh Hunt, who published in The Examiner Keats’s poem O Solitude, and through whom he met Shelley. His first volume of poems was published in March 1817. Sales were meager and that Autumn came the first of the harsh critical attacks in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, labelling Keats and his associates as members of the so-called Cockney school. These attacks were repeated upon the publication of Endymion in 1818. Meanwhile his brother Tom was very ill with tuberculosis from which he died, attended by Keats in December of the same year. Keats then moved into his friend Brown’s house in Hampstead where he met and fell deeply in love with Fanny Brawne. Although increasingly troubled by sore throats, September 1818 marked the beginning of what has come to be called the Great Year; he wrote, consecutively, The Eve of St Agnes, The Eve of St Mark, the Ode to Psyche, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Ode to a Nightingale and probably at the same time Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode on Melancholy, and Ode on Indolence; Lamia, The Fall of Hyperion, and To Autumn.

This outpouring of major poetry is unmatched in English. The symptoms of tuberculosis appeared early in 1820, in which year he traveled to Italy, with a friend Joseph Severn, in search of a better climate.

They arrived in Naples harbour on 21 October 1820. Here the ship was held in quarantine for 10 days and they did not arrive in Rome until 15 November. Keats’s doctor, James Clark, who lived in Piazza di Spagna and knew Keats's story, was himself interested in literature and looked after the poet with care and devotion. He believed, however, that Keats had digestive problems and not the tuberculosis which had been diagnosed in England. To raise Keats's morale, which was low after his long journey, he suggested regular exercise instead of the rest prescribed in London. Keats was able to go out at first, and would sometimes walk on the Pincio. He and Severn even hired horses and rode out on the Via Flaminia. But on 10 December 1820, he suffered a serious haemorrhage. He recovered slightly for Christmas and started to go out again; but on 10 January his health finally broke down and he never left his bedroom again. He died in Severn’s arms on 23 February 1821 and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery, behind the Pyramid in Testaccio. He was 25 years old.

Keats expressed the wish that on his gravestone no name or date should be written, only the inscription 'Here lies one whose name was writ in water' Above it was to be carved a Greek lyre with four of its eight strings broken 'to show his Classical Genius cut off by death before its maturity' as Severn later interpreted it.

Keats has always been regarded as one of the principal figures in the Romantic movement, and his stature as a poet has grown steadily through all changes of fashion. His letters, published in 1848 and 1878, have come to be regarded with almost the admiration given to his poetry. They mix everyday events with wit and high spirits as well as the profoundest thoughts on love, poetry and the nature of man.

Keats did not write a single line of poetry during his time in Rome. Only once did he succeed in putting pen to paper; it was on 30 November when he wrote to his friend Charles Brown:

“My dear Brown

‘It is 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…I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence. God knows how it would have been - but it appears to me - however, I will not speak of that subject…I am so weak (in mind) that I cannot bear the sight of any hand writing of a friend I love so much as I do you…There is one thought enough to kill me - I have been well, healthy, alert &c, walking with her - and now - the knowledge of contrast, feeling for light and shade, all that information (primitive sense) necessary for a poem are great enemies to the recovery of the stomach…Dr Clarke is very attentive to me; he says, there is very little the matter with my lungs, but my stomach, he says is very bad. I am well disappointed in hearing good news from George, - for it runs in my head we shall all die young…If I recover, I will do all in my power to correct the mistakes made during sickness; and if I should not, all my faults will be forgiven. Severn is very well, though he leads so dull a life with me. Remember me to all friends, and tell x x x x I should not have left London without taking leave of him, but from being so low in body and mind. Write to George as soon as you receive this, and tell him how I am, as far as you can guess; - and also a note 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”