169-] English Literature - John Keats

169-] English Literature

John Keats 

Death, 1821

The first months of 1821 marked a slow and steady decline into the final stage of tuberculosis. His autopsy showed his lung almost disintegrated. Keats was coughing up blood and covered in sweat. 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... about four, the approaches of death came on. [Keats said] "Severn – I – lift me up – I am dying – I shall die easy; don't be frightened – be firm, and thank God it has come." I lifted him up in my arms. 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 1821. 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 erected the stone, which under a relief of a lyre with broken strings, includes the epitaph:

This Grave / contains all that was Mortal, / of a / YOUNG ENGLISH POET, / Who, / on his Death Bed, / in the Bitterness of his Heart, / at the Malicious Power of his Enemies, / Desired / these Words to be engraven on his Tomb Stone / Here lies One / Whose Name was writ in Water / Feb 24th 1821

The text bears an echo from Catullus LXX:

Sed mulier cupido quod dicit amanti / in vento et rapida scribere oportet aqua (What a woman says to a passionate lover / should be written in the wind and the running water).

Francis Beaumont also used the expression in The Nice Valour, Act 5, scene 5 (? 1616):

All your better deeds / Shall be in water writ, but this in marble.

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;

'Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle

Should let itself be snuffed out by an article .

(canto 11, stanza 60)

Seven weeks after the funeral, Shelley memorialised Keats in his poem Adonais. Clark saw to a planting of daisies on the grave, saying Keats would have wished it. 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. The ashes of Shelley, one of Keats's most fervent champions, are buried in the cemetery and Joseph Severn is buried next to Keats. 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".

Reception

When Keats died at 25, he had been writing poetry seriously for only about six years, from 1814 until the summer of 1820, and publishing for only four. In his lifetime, sales of Keats's three volumes of poetry probably amounted to only 200 copies. His first poem, the sonnet O Solitude, appeared in the Examiner in May 1816, while his collection Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and other poems was published in July 1820 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, 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. Keats was convinced that he had made no mark in his lifetime. Aware that he was dying, he wrote to Fanny Brawne in February 1820, "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. His admirers praised him for thinking "on his pulses", for having developed a style which was more heavily loaded with sensualities, more gorgeous in its effects, more voluptuously alive than any poet who had come before him: "loading every rift with ore". Shelley often corresponded with Keats in Rome and loudly declared that Keats's death had been brought on by bad reviews in the Quarterly Review. Seven weeks after the funeral he wrote Adonais, a despairing elegy, 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. His poetic sense was based on the conventional tastes of his friend Charles Cowden Clarke, who first introduced him to the classics, and also came from the predilections of Hunt's Examiner, which Keats read as a boy. 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. Indeed, 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.

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. His work had the full support of the influential Cambridge Apostles, whose members included the young Tennyson, later a popular Poet Laureate who came to regard Keats as the greatest poet of the 19th century. Constance Naden was a great admirer of his poems, arguing that his genius lay in his 'exquisite sensitiveness to all the elements of beauty'. In 1848, 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. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, including Millais and Rossetti, were inspired by Keats and painted scenes from his poems including "The Eve of St. Agnes", "Isabella" and "La Belle Dame sans Merci", lush, arresting and popular images which remain closely associated with Keats's work.

In 1882, Swinburne wrote in the Encyclopædia Britannica that "the Ode to a Nightingale [was] one of the final masterpieces of human work in all time and for all ages". In the 20th century Keats remained the muse of poets such as Wilfred Owen, who kept his death date as a day of mourning, Yeats and T. S. Eliot.[85] Critic Helen Vendler stated the odes "are a group of works in which the English language finds an ultimate embodiment."[89] Bate said of To Autumn: "Each generation has found it one of the most nearly perfect poems in English" and M. R. 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. Other collections of material are archived at the British Library, Keats House, Hampstead, the Keats–Shelley Memorial House in Rome and the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. Since 1998 the British Keats-Shelley Memorial Association have annually awarded a prize for romantic poetry. A Royal Society of Arts blue plaque was unveiled in 1896 to commemorate Keats at Keats House.

Jorge Luis Borges named his first encounter with Keats an experience he felt all his life.

Legacy

Keats died young, aged 25, with only a three-year-long writing career. Nonetheless, he left a substantial body of work that makes him more than a “poet of promise.” His mystique was also heightened by his alleged humble origins, as he was presented as a lowlife and someone who received a sparse education.

Shelley, in his preface to Adonais (1821), described Keats as "delicate," "fragile," and "blighted in the bud": "a pale flower by some sad maiden cherished ... The bloom, whose petals nipt before they blew / Died on the promise of the fruit," wrote Shelley.

Keats himself underestimated his writerly ability. "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," he wrote to Fanny Brawne.

Richard Monckton Milnes published the first biography of Keats in 1848, which fully inserted him into the canon. The Encyclopaedia Britannica extolled the virtues of Keats in numerous instances: in 1880, Swinburne wrote in his entry on John Keats that "the Ode to a Nightingale, [is] one of the final masterpieces of human work in all time and for all ages," while the 1888 edition stated that, "Of these [odes] perhaps the two nearest to absolute perfection, to the triumphant achievement and accomplishment of the very utmost beauty possible to human words, may be that of to Autumn and that on a Grecian Urn." In the 20th century, Wilfred Owen, W.B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot were all inspired by Keats.

As far as other arts are concerned, given how sensual his writing was, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood admired him, and painters depicted scenes of Keats poems, such as "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," "The Eve of St. Agnes," and "Isabella."

Reputation

It is impossible to say how much has been lost by Keats’s early death. His reputation grew steadily throughout the 19th century, though as late as the 1840s the Pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt could refer to him as “this little-known poet.” His influence is found everywhere in the decorative Romantic verse of the Victorian Age, from the early work of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, onward. His general emotional temper and the minute delicacy of his natural observation were greatly admired by the Pre-Raphaelites, who both echoed his poetry in their own and illustrated it in their paintings. Keats’s 19th-century followers on the whole valued the more superficial aspects of his work, and it was largely left for the 20th century to realize the full range of his technical and intellectual achievement.

Biographers

None of Keats's biographies were written by people who had known him. Shortly after his death, his publishers announced they would speedily publish The memoirs and remains of John Keats but his friends refused to cooperate and argued with each other to such an extent that the project was abandoned. Leigh Hunt's Lord Byron and some of his Contemporaries (1828) gives the first biographical account, strongly emphasising Keats's supposedly humble origins, a misconception which still continues. Given that he was becoming a significant figure within artistic circles, a succession of other publications followed, including anthologies of his many notes, chapters and letters. However, early accounts often gave contradictory or biased versions of events and were subject to dispute. His friends Brown, Severn, Dilke, Shelley and his guardian Richard Abbey, his publisher Taylor, Fanny Brawne and many others issued posthumous commentary on Keats's life. 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 first full biography was published in 1848 by Richard Monckton Milnes. Landmark Keats biographers since include Sidney Colvin, Robert Gittings, Walter Jackson Bate, Aileen Ward, and Andrew Motion. 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.

Other portrayals

John Keats: His Life and Death, the first major motion picture about the life of Keats, was produced in 1973 by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. It was directed by John Barnes. John Stride played John Keats and Janina Faye played Fanny Brawne.

The 2009 film Bright Star, written and directed by Jane Campion, focuses on Keats's relationship with Fanny Brawne. Inspired by the 1997 Keats biography penned by Andrew Motion, it stars Ben Whishaw as Keats and Abbie Cornish as Fanny.

Poet Laureate Simon Armitage wrote "'I speak as someone...'" to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Keats's death. It was first published in The Times on 20 February 2021.

In 2007 a sculpture of Keats seated on bench, by sculptor Stuart Williamson, at Guys and Saint Thomas' Hospital, London, was unveiled by the Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion.

Letters

The prime authority both for Keats’s life and for his poetical development is to be found in his letters . This correspondence with his brothers and sister, with his close friends, and with Fanny Brawne gives the most intimate picture of the admirable integrity of Keats’s personal character and enables the reader to follow closely the development of his thought about poetry—his own and that of others.

His letters evince a profound thoughtfulness combined with a quick, sensitive, undidactic critical response. Spontaneous, informal, deeply thought, and deeply felt, these are among the best letters written by any English poet. Apart from their interest as a commentary on his work, they have the right to independent literary status.

Keats's letters were first published in 1848 and 1878. 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, and are highly regarded in the canon of English literary correspondence. T. S. 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... will not be found to be true, and what is more, true for greater and more mature poetry than anything Keats ever wrote."

Few of Keats's letters remain from the period before he joined his literary circle. From spring 1817, however, there is a rich record of his prolific and impressive letter-writing skills. He and his friends, poets, critics, novelists, and editors wrote to each other daily, and Keats's ideas are bound up in the ordinary, his day-to-day missives sharing news, parody and social commentary. They glitter with humour and critical intelligence. Born of an "unself-conscious stream of consciousness," they are impulsive, full of awareness of his own nature and his weak spots. 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. Gittings sees them as akin to a "spiritual journal" not written for a specific other, so much as for synthesis.

Keats also reflected on the background and composition of his poetry. Specific letters often coincide with or anticipate the poems they describe. In February to May 1819 he produced many of his finest letters. Writing to his brother George, Keats explored the idea of the world as "the vale of Soul-making", anticipating the great odes he wrote some months later. In the letters Keats coined ideas such as the Mansion of Many Apartments and the Chameleon Poet, which came to gain common currency and capture the public imagination, though only making single appearances as phrases in his correspondence.  The poetical mind, Keats argued:

has no self – it is every thing and nothing – It has no character – it enjoys light and shade;... 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.

He used the term negative capability to discuss the state of being in which we are "capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.... [Being] content with half knowledge" where one trusts in the heart's perceptions . He wrote later he was "certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of Imagination – What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth – whether it existed before or not – for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty" constantly returning to what it means to be a poet. "My Imagination is a Monastery and I am its Monk", Keats notes to Shelley. In September 1819, Keats wrote to Reynolds "How beautiful the season is now – How fine the air. 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". The final stanza of his last great ode, "To Autumn", runs:

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;

"To Autumn" was to become one of the most highly regarded poems in the English language.

There are areas of his life and daily routine that Keats omits. He mentions little of his childhood or his financial straits, being seemingly embarrassed to discuss them. There is no reference to his parents. In his last year, as his health deteriorated, his concerns often give way to despair and morbid obsessions. His letters to Fanny Brawne, published in 1870, focus on the period and emphasise its tragic aspect, giving rise to widespread criticism at the time.

John Keats

Poems (1817)

Sleep and Poetry

What is more gentle than a wind in summer?

What is more soothing than the pretty hummer

That stays one moment in an open flower,

And buzzes cheerily from bower to bower?

What is more tranquil than a musk-rose blowing

In a green island, far from all men's knowing?

More healthful than the leafiness of dales?

More secret than a nest of nightingales?

More serene than Cordelia's countenance?

More full of visions than a high romance?

What, but thee Sleep? Soft closer of our eyes!

Low murmurer of tender lullabies!

Light hoverer around our happy pillows!

Wreather of poppy buds, and weeping willows!

Silent entangler of a beauty's tresses!

Most happy listener! when the morning blesses

Thee for enlivening all the cheerful eyes

That glance so brightly at the new sun-rise(“Sleep and Poetry,” lines 1-18)

A Great Year (1818-19)

Ode on a Grecian Urn

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,

Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,

Sylvan historian, who canst thus express

A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:

What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape

Of deities or mortals, or of both,

In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?

What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?

What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?

What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

 

“Ode on a Grecian Urn,” lines 1—10

Bright Stars: Female Acquaintances

Bright Star

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—

Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,

The moving waters at their priestlike task

Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,

Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask

Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—

No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,

Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,

To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,

Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,

And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

 

166-] English Literature - John Keats

166-] English Literature

John Keats

 John Keats (31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821) was an English poet of the second generation of Romantic poets, along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. His poems had been in publication for less than four years when he died of tuberculosis at the age of 25. They were indifferently received in his lifetime, but his fame grew rapidly after his death. By the end of the century, he was placed in the canon of English literature, strongly influencing many writers of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; the Encyclopædia Britannica of 1888 called one ode "one of the final masterpieces". Jorge Luis Borges named his first time reading Keats an experience he felt all his life. Keats had a style "heavily loaded with sensualities", notably in the series of odes. Typically of the Romantics, he accentuated extreme emotion through natural imagery. Today his poems and letters remain among the most popular and analysed in English literature – in particular "Ode to a Nightingale", "Ode on a Grecian Urn", "Sleep and Poetry" and the sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer".

Early life and education, 1795–1810

John Keats was born in Moorgate, London, on 31 October 1795, to Thomas and Frances Keats (née Jennings). There is little evidence of his exact birthplace. Although Keats and his family seem to have marked his birthday on 29 October, baptism records give the date as the 31st. He was the eldest of four surviving children; his younger siblings were George (1797–1841), Thomas (1799–1818), and Frances Mary "Fanny" (1803–1889), who later married the Spanish author Valentín Llanos Gutiérrez. Another son was lost in infancy. His father first worked as an ostler at the stables attached to the Swan and Hoop Inn owned by his father-in-law, John Jennings, an establishment he later managed, and where the growing family lived for some years. Keats believed he was born at the inn, a birthplace of humble origins, but there is no evidence to support this. The Globe pub now occupies the site (2012), a few yards from modern Moorgate station. Keats was baptised at St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate, and sent to a local dame school as a child.

His parents wished to send their sons to Eton or Harrow, but the family decided they could not afford the fees. In the summer of 1803, John was sent to board at John Clarke's school in Enfield, close to his grandparents' house. The small school had a liberal outlook and a progressive curriculum more modern than the larger, more prestigious schools. In the family atmosphere at Clarke's, Keats developed an interest in classics and history, which would stay with him throughout his short life. The headmaster's son, Charles Cowden Clarke, also became an important mentor and friend, introducing Keats to Renaissance literature, including Tasso, Spenser, and Chapman's translations. The young Keats was described by his friend Edward Holmes as a volatile character, "always in extremes", given to indolence and fighting. However, at 13 he began focusing his energy on reading and study, winning his first academic prize in midsummer 1809.

In April 1804, when Keats was eight, his father died from a skull fracture after falling from his horse while returning from a visit to Keats and his brother George at school. Thomas Keats died intestate. Frances remarried two months later, but left her new husband soon afterwards , and the four children went to live with a grandmother, Alice Jennings, in the village of Edmonton.

In March 1810, when Keats was 14, his mother died of tuberculosis, leaving the children in their grandmother's custody. She appointed two guardians, Richard Abbey and John Sandell, for them. That autumn, Keats left Clarke's school to be an apprentice with Thomas Hammond, a surgeon and apothecary who was a neighbour and the doctor of the Jennings family. Keats lodged in the attic above the surgery, at 7 Church Street, until 1813. Cowden Clarke, who remained close to Keats, called this period "the most placid time in Keats' life."

From 1814 Keats had two bequests, held in trust for him until his 21st birthday. £800 was willed by his grandfather John Jennings. Also Keats's mother left a legacy of £8000 to be equally divided among her living children. It seems he was not told of the £800 and probably knew nothing of it as he never applied for it. Historically, blame has often been laid on Abbey as legal guardian, but he may also have been unaware of it. William Walton, solicitor for Keats's mother and grandmother, definitely knew and had a duty of care to relay the information to Keats. It seems he did not, though it would have made a critical difference to the poet's expectations. Money was always a great concern and difficulty, as he struggled to stay out of debt and make his way in the world independently.

Career

Medical training and writing poetry

In October 1815, having finished his five-year apprenticeship with Hammond, Keats registered as a medical student at Guy's Hospital (now part of King's College London) and began studying there. Within a month, he was accepted as a dresser at the hospital assisting surgeons during operations, the equivalent of a junior house surgeon today. It was a significant promotion, that marked a distinct aptitude for medicine; and it brought greater responsibility and a heavier workload. Keats's long and expensive medical training with Hammond and at Guy's Hospital led his family to assume he would pursue a lifelong career in medicine, assuring financial security, and it seems that, at this point, Keats had a genuine desire to become a doctor. He lodged near the hospital, at 28 St Thomas's Street in Southwark, with other medical students, including Henry Stephens who gained fame as an inventor and ink magnate.

Keats's training took up increasing amounts of his writing time and he became increasingly ambivalent about it. He felt he was facing a stark choice. He had written his first extant poem, "An Imitation of Spenser", in 1814, when he was 19. Now, strongly drawn by ambition, inspired by fellow poets such as Leigh Hunt and Lord Byron, and beleaguered by family financial crises, he suffered periods of depression. His brother George wrote that John "feared that he should never be a poet, & if he was not he would destroy himself." In 1816, Keats received his apothecary's licence, which made him eligible to practise as an apothecary, physician and surgeon, but before the end of the year he had informed his guardian that he resolved to be a poet, not a surgeon.

Publication and literary circles

Although he continued his work and training at Guy's, Keats devoted more and more time to the study of literature, experimenting with verse forms, particularly the sonnet. In May 1816, Leigh Hunt agreed to publish the sonnet "O Solitude" in his magazine The Examiner, a leading liberal magazine of the day. This was the first appearance of Keats's poetry in print; Charles Cowden Clarke called it his friend's red letter day, first proof that Keats' ambitions were valid. Among his poems of 1816 was To My Brothers. That summer, Keats went with Clarke to the seaside town of Margate to write. There he began "Calidore" and initiated an era of great letter writing. On returning to London, he took lodgings at 8 Dean Street, Southwark, and braced himself to study further for membership of the Royal College of Surgeons.

In October 1816 Clarke introduced Keats to the influential Leigh Hunt, a close friend of Byron and Shelley. Five months later came the publication of Poems, the first volume of Keats's verse, which included "I stood tiptoe" and "Sleep and Poetry", both strongly influenced by Hunt. The book was a critical failure, arousing little interest, although Reynolds reviewed it favourably in The Champion. Clarke commented that the book "might have emerged in Timbuctoo." Keats's publishers, Charles and James Ollier, felt ashamed of it. Keats immediately changed publishers to Taylor and Hessey in Fleet Street. Unlike the Olliers, Keats's new publishers were enthusiastic about his work. Within a month of the publication of Poems they were planning a new Keats volume and had paid him an advance. Hessey became a steady friend to Keats and made the company's rooms available for young writers to meet. Their publishing lists came to include Coleridge, Hazlitt, Clare, Hogg, Carlyle and Charles Lamb.

Through Taylor and Hessey, Keats met their Eton-educated lawyer, Richard Woodhouse, who advised them on literary as well as legal matters and was deeply impressed by Poems. Although he noted that Keats could be "wayward, trembling, easily daunted," Woodhouse was convinced of Keats's genius, a poet to support as he became one of England's greatest writers. Soon after they met, the two became close friends, and Woodhouse started to collect Keatsiana, documenting as much as he could about the poetry. This archive survives as one of the main sources of information on Keats's work. Andrew Motion represents him as Boswell to Keats's Johnson, ceaselessly promoting his work, fighting his corner and spurring his poetry to greater heights. In later years, Woodhouse was one of the few to accompany Keats to Gravesend, Kent, to embark on his final trip to Rome.

Despite the bad reviews of Poems, Hunt published the essay "Three Young Poets" (Shelley, Keats, and Reynolds) and the sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer", foreseeing great things to come. He introduced Keats to many prominent men in his circle, including the editor of The Times, Thomas Barnes; the writer Charles Lamb; the conductor Vincent Novello; and the poet John Hamilton Reynolds, who would become a close friend. Keats also met regularly with William Hazlitt, a powerful literary figure of the day. It was a turning point for Keats, establishing him in the public eye as a figure in what Hunt termed "a new school of poetry". At this time Keats wrote to his friend Bailey, "I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the imagination. What imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth."] This passage would eventually be transmuted into the concluding lines of "Ode on a Grecian Urn": "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know". In early December 1816, under the heady influence of his artistic friends, Keats told Abbey he had decided to give up medicine in favour of poetry, to Abbey's fury. Keats had spent a great deal on his medical training, and despite his state of financial hardship and indebtedness, made large loans to friends such as the painter Benjamin Haydon. Keats would go on to lend £700 to his brother George. By lending so much, Keats could no longer cover the interest of his own debts.

Personal crisis

In the summer of 1818 Keats went on a walking tour in the Lake District (of northern England) and Scotland with his friend Charles Brown, and his exposure and overexertions on that trip brought on the first symptoms of the tuberculosis of which he was to die. On his return to London a brutal criticism of his early poems appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine, followed by a similar attack on Endymion in the Quarterly Review. Contrary to later assertions, Keats met these reviews with a calm assertion of his own talents, and he went on steadily writing poetry. But there were family troubles. Keats’s brother Tom had been suffering from tuberculosis for some time, and in the autumn of 1818 the poet nursed him through his last illness. About the same time, he met Fanny Brawne, a near neighbour in Hampstead, with whom he soon fell hopelessly and tragically in love. The relation with Fanny had a decisive effect on Keats’s development. She seems to have been an unexceptional young woman, of firm and generous character, and kindly disposed toward Keats. But he expected more, perhaps more than anyone could give, as is evident from his overwrought letters. Both his uncertain material situation and his failing health in any case made it impossible for their relationship to run a normal course. After Tom’s death (George had already gone to America), Keats moved into Wentworth Place with Brown, and in April 1819 Brawne and her mother became his next-door neighbours . About October 1819 Keats became engaged to Fanny.

The year 1819

Keats had written “Isabella,” an adaptation of the story of the Pot of Basil in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, in 1817–18, soon after the completion of Endymion, and again he was dissatisfied with his work. It was during the year 1819 that all his greatest poetry was written—“Lamia,” “The Eve of St. Agnes,” the great odes (“On Indolence,” “On a Grecian Urn,” “To Psyche,” “To a Nightingale,” “On Melancholy,” and “To Autumn”), and the two versions of Hyperion. This poetry was composed under the strain of illness and his growing love for Brawne, and it is an astonishing body of work, marked by careful and considered development, technical, emotional, and intellectual. “Isabella,” which Keats himself called “a weak-sided poem,” contains some of the emotional weaknesses of Endymion, but “The Eve of St. Agnes” may be considered the perfect culmination of Keats’s earlier poetic style. Written in the first flush of his meeting with Brawne, it conveys an atmosphere of passion and excitement in its description of the elopement of a pair of youthful lovers. Written in Spenserian stanzas, the poem presents its theme with unrivaled delicacy but displays no marked intellectual advance over Keats’s earlier efforts. “Lamia” is another narrative poem and is a deliberate attempt to reform some of the technical weaknesses of Endymion. Keats makes use in this poem of a far tighter and more disciplined couplet, a firmer tone, and more controlled description.

The odes are Keats’s most distinctive poetic achievement. They are essentially lyrical meditations on some object or quality that prompts the poet to confront the conflicting impulses of his inner being and to reflect upon his own longings and their relations to the wider world around him. All the odes were composed between March and June 1819 except “To Autumn,” which is from September. The internal debates in the odes centre on the dichotomy of eternal, transcendent ideals and the transience and change of the physical world. This subject was forced upon Keats by the painful death of his brother and his own failing health, and the odes highlight his struggle for self-awareness and certainty through the liberating powers of his imagination. In the “Ode to a Nightingale” a visionary happiness in communing with the nightingale and its song is contrasted with the dead weight of human grief and sickness, and the transience of youth and beauty—strongly brought home to Keats in recent months by his brother’s death. The song of the nightingale is seen as a symbol of art that outlasts the individual’s mortal life. This theme is taken up more distinctly in the “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” The figures of the lovers depicted on the Greek urn become for him the symbol of an enduring but unconsummated passion that subtly belies the poem’s celebrated conclusion, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” The “Ode on Melancholy” recognizes that sadness is the inevitable concomitant of human passion and happiness and that the transience of joy and desire is an inevitable aspect of the natural process. But the rich, slow movement of this and the other odes suggests an enjoyment of such intensity and depth that it makes the moment eternal. “To Autumn” is essentially the record of such an experience. Autumn is seen not as a time of decay but as a season of complete ripeness and fulfillment, a pause in time when everything has reached fruition , and the question of transience is hardly raised. These poems, with their rich and exquisitely sensuous detail and their meditative depth, are among the greatest achievements of Romantic poetry. With them should be mentioned the ballad “La Belle Dame sans merci,” of about the same time, which reveals the obverse and destructive side of the idyllic love seen in “The Eve of St. Agnes.”

Keats’s fragmentary poetic epic, Hyperion, exists in two versions, the second being a revision of the first with the addition of a long prologue in a new style, which makes it into a different poem. Hyperion was begun in the autumn of 1818, and all that there is of the first version was finished by April 1819. In September Keats wrote to Reynolds that he had given up Hyperion, but he appears to have continued working on the revised edition, The Fall of Hyperion, during the autumn of 1819. The two versions of Hyperion cover the period of Keats’s most intense experience, both poetical and personal. The poem is his last attempt, in the face of increasing illness and frustrated love, to come to terms with the conflict between absolute value and mortal decay that appears in other forms in his earlier poetry. The epic’s subject is the supersession of the earlier Greek gods, the Titans, by the later Olympian gods. Keats’s desire to write something unlike the luxuriant wandering of Endymion is clear, and he thus consciously attempts to emulate the epic loftiness of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. The poem opens with the Titans already fallen, like Milton’s fallen angels, and Hyperion, the sun god, is their one hope of further resistance, like Milton’s Satan. There are numerous Miltonisms of style, but these are subdued in the revised version, as Keats felt unhappy with them, and the basis of the writing is revealed after all as a more austere and disciplined version of Keats’s own manner. There is not enough of the narrative to make its ultimate direction clear, but it seems that the poem’s hero was to be the young Apollo, the god of poetry. So, as Endymion was an allegory of the fate of the lover of beauty in the world, Hyperion was perhaps to be an allegory of the poet as creator. Certainly this theme is taken up explicitly in the new prologue to the second version.

The second version of Hyperion is one of the most remarkable pieces of writing in Keats’s work; the blank verse has a new energy and rapidity, and the vision is presented with a spare grandeur, rising to its height in the epiphany of the goddess Moneta, who reveals to the dreamer the function of the poet in the world. It is his duty to separate himself from the mere dreamer and to share in the sufferings of humankind. The theme is not new to Keats—it appears in his earliest poetry—but it is here realized far more intensely. Yet with the threat of approaching death upon him, Keats could not advance any further in the direction that he foresaw as the right one, and the poem remains a fragment.

Travelling and ill health

Having left his training at the hospital, suffering from a succession of colds, and unhappy with living in damp rooms in London, Keats moved with his brothers into rooms at 1 Well Walk in the village of Hampstead in April 1817. There John and George nursed their tubercular brother Tom. The house was close to Hunt and others of his circle in Hampstead, and to Coleridge, respected elder of the first wave of Romantic poets, then living in Highgate. On 11 April 1818, Keats reported that he and Coleridge had taken a long walk on Hampstead Heath. In a letter to his brother George, he wrote that they had talked about "a thousand things , ... nightingales, poetry, poetical sensation, metaphysics." Around this time he was introduced to Charles Wentworth Dilke and James Rice.

In June 1818, Keats began a walking tour of Scotland, Ireland and the Lake District with Charles Armitage Brown. Keats's brother George and his wife Georgiana accompanied them to Lancaster and then continued to Liverpool, from where they migrated to America, living in Ohio and Louisville, Kentucky, until 1841, when George's investments failed. Like Keats's other brother, they both died penniless and racked by tuberculosis, for which there was no effective treatment until the next century. In July, while on the Isle of Mull, Keats caught a bad cold and "was too thin and fevered to proceed on the journey." After returning south in August, Keats continued to nurse Tom, so exposing himself to infection. Some have suggested this was when tuberculosis, his "family disease", took hold. "Consumption" was not identified as a disease with a single infectious origin until 1820. There was considerable stigma attached to it, as it was often tied with weakness, repressed sexual passion or masturbation. Keats "refuses to give it a name" in his letters. Tom Keats died on 1 December 1818.

Wentworth Place: annus mirabilis

John Keats moved to the newly built Wentworth Place, owned by his friend Charles Armitage Brown. It was on the edge of Hampstead Heath, ten minutes' walk south of his old home in Well Walk. The winter of 1818–19, though a difficult period for the poet, marked the beginning of his annus mirabilis in which he wrote his most mature work. He had been inspired by a series of recent lectures by Hazlitt on English poets and poetic identity and had also met Wordsworth. Keats may have seemed to his friends to be living on comfortable means, but in reality he was borrowing regularly from Abbey and his friends.

He composed five of his six great odes at Wentworth Place in April and May and, although it is debated in which order they were written, "Ode to Psyche" opened the published series. According to Brown, "Ode to a Nightingale" was composed under a plum tree in the garden. Brown wrote, "In the spring of 1819 a nightingale had built her nest near my house. Keats felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song; and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast-table to the grass-plot under a plum-tree, where he sat for two or three hours. When he came into the house, I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his hand, and these he was quietly thrusting behind the books. On inquiry, I found those scraps, four or five in number, contained his poetic feelings on the song of our nightingale." Dilke, co-owner of the house, strenuously denied the story, printed in Richard Monckton Milnes' 1848 biography of Keats, dismissing it as 'pure delusion'.

"Ode on a Grecian Urn" and "Ode on Melancholy" were inspired by sonnet forms and probably written after "Ode to a Nightingale".Keats's new and progressive publishers Taylor and Hessey issued Endymion, which Keats dedicated to Thomas Chatterton, a work that he termed "a trial of my Powers of Imagination". It was damned by the critics, giving rise to Byron's quip that Keats was ultimately "snuffed out by an article", suggesting that he never truly got over it. A particularly harsh review by John Wilson Croker appeared in the April 1818 edition of the Quarterly Review. John Gibson Lockhart writing in Blackwood's Magazine, described Endymion as "imperturbable drivelling idiocy". With biting sarcasm, Lockhart advised, "It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr John, back to plasters, pills, and ointment boxes." It was Lockhart at Blackwoods who coined the defamatory term "the Cockney School" for Hunt and his circle, which included both Hazlitt and Keats. The dismissal was as much political as literary, aimed at upstart young writers deemed uncouth for their lack of education, non-formal rhyming and "low diction". They had not attended Eton, Harrow or Oxbridge and they were not from the upper classes.

In 1819 Keats wrote "The Eve of St. Agnes", "La Belle Dame sans Merci", "Hyperion", "Lamia" and a play, Otho the Great (critically damned and not performed until 1950). The poems "Fancy" and "Bards of passion and of mirth" were inspired by the garden of Wentworth Place. In September, very short of money and in despair considering taking up journalism or a post as a ship's surgeon, he approached his publishers with a new book of poems. They were unimpressed with the collection, finding the presented versions of "Lamia" confusing, and describing "St Agnes" as having a "sense of pettish disgust" and "a 'Don Juan' style of mingling up sentiment and sneering" concluding it was "a poem unfit for ladies". The final volume Keats lived to see, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, was eventually published in July 1820. It received greater acclaim than had Endymion or Poems, finding favourable notices in both The Examiner and Edinburgh Review. It would come to be recognised as one of the most important poetic works ever published.