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MODULE B - John Keats (1795-1821) (p. 96)

TASK
Read the text below and make notes about Keats' life and works.

John Keats' father was head stableman at a London livery stable; he married his employer's daughter and inherited the business. John was the first of five children. He was sent to the Reverend John Clarke's private school at Enfield. His teacher, the headmaster's son, encouraged Keats' passion for reading and, both at school and in the course of their later friendship, introduced him to Spenser and other poets, to music, and to the theater.
When Keats was eight his father was killed by a fall from a horse, and when he was fourteen his mother died of tuberculosis. The children's guardian took John out of school at the age of fifteen and bound him apprentice to a surgeon and apothecary at Edmonton. In 1815 Keats carried on his medical studies at Guy's Hospital, London and the next year qualified to practice as an apothecary-surgeon - but almost immediately, over his guardian's protests, he abandoned medicine for poetry. […]
The rapidity and sureness of Keats' development has no match. He did not even undertake poetry until his eighteenth year and, for the following few years, produced album verse that was at best merely competent and at times manifested an arch sentimentality. Suddenly, in 1816, he spoke out loud and bold in the sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer. […]
In 1817 he went on to compose Endymion, an ambitious undertaking of more than four thousand lines, and then the epic poem Hyperion, conceived on the model of Milton's Paradise Lost, which he left unfinished.
In 1818 Keats met a series of disappointments and disasters, from harsh attacks on his works to his brother's death. In the summer of that year he took a strenuous walking tour in the English Lake District, Scotland and Ireland; it was a glorious adventure but a totally exhausting one in wet, cold weather, and he returned in August with a chronically ulcerated throat made increasingly ominous by the shadow of the tuberculosis that had killed his mother and brother. And in the late fall of 1818 Keats fell unwillingly, helplessly in love with Fanny Brawne. This pretty, vivacious, and mildly flirtatious girl of eighteen had little interest in poetry, but she possessed an alert and sensible mind and loved Keats sincerely. They became engaged, but Keats's dedication to poetry, his poverty, and his growing illness made marriage impossible and love a torment.
In this period of acute distress and emotional turmoil, within five years of his first trying his hand at poetry, Keats achieved the culmination of his brief poetic career. Between January and September of 1819, masterpiece followed masterpiece in astonishing succession: The Eve of St. Agnes, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, all of the "great odes", Lamia and a sufficient number of fine sonnets to make him, with Wordsworth, the major Romantic craftsman in that form.[…]
Under the richly sensuous surface, we find Keats's characteristic presentation of all experience as a tangle of inseparable but irreconcilable opposites. He finds melancholy in delight and pleasure in pain; he feels the highest intensity of love as an approximation to death; he inclines equally towards a life of indolence and "sensation" and towards a life of thought; he is aware both of the attraction of an imaginative dream world without "disagreeables" and the remorseless pressure of the actual; he aspires at the same time for aesthetic detachment and for social responsibility. […]
In the spring and summer of 1820 a series of hemorrhages rapidly weakened him. In the autumn he allowed himself to be persuaded to seek the milder climate of Italy, but he died in Rome on February 23, 1821, and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery.

(Abridged from The Norton Anthology of English Literature, W.W. Norton & Company, New York and London 1996.)