Presenting John Keats:
Work and Reappraisal

Were we interested only in Keats’s lifetime publications, the poet’s career might be summed up in four brief paragraphs and his bibliography might be quite concise:

Poems. 1817.

Keats’s earliest attempt at writing poetry dates from 1814 and included an “Imitation of Spenser.” Leaving his apprenticeship at Guy’s Hospital in 1815, he composed his “Ode to Apollo” and “Hymn to Apollo.” 1816 was the start of a new chapter in Keats’s life. Although he was licensed as an apothecary, he chose instead to take up the financially precarious profession of poet. In the same year he met controversial Leigh Hunt who would take an interest in the emerging poet and would publish his poem “O Solitude” and his sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” in the Examiner. At the time, Keats was also actively writing and planning his first major work, Endymion. His first volume of poems, including “Sleep and Poetry,” was published in March 1817 with little review, meager public notice, and few sales. Due to its rather erratic publishing schedule, Blackwood’s Magazine, with John Gibson Lockhart’s vitriolic attack on Keats and those Lockhart labeled as the Cockney School, did not appear until October. In a letter to his brothers George and Thomas, dated 22 December 1817, Keats first maps out his vision of the process of poetic creativity he calls “negative capability,” i.e., “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason—.”

Endymion. 1818.

In the meantime Keats finished Endymion, dedicating the volume to the young poet-suicide Thomas Chatterton, whose work he admired and whom he described as “the purest writer in the English Language.” Endymion was published in the spring and by May Keats had finished “Isabella; or the Pot of Basil.” That summer Keats and his friend, Charles Armitage Brown, made their tour of Ireland and Scotland, which would nourish Keats’s sensibility for Hyperion and irreparably damage his health. Keats returned from the abbreviated tour, ill himself, to nurse his dying brother Tom. For a second time, spring publication was followed by harsh autumn review—this time in both Blackwood’s and The Quarterly Review. Given the burden of debt, ill health, and a dying brother, it is difficult to gauge how profoundly Keats was affected by the criticism of Endymion, a work with which he had become impatient and whose flaws he acknowledged, but he did write to his brother George, “I think I shall be among the English poets after my death.”

“The Great Year”

After Tom’s death in December, an ailing John Keats moved to Brown’s Hampstead home and there met and fell in love with Fanny Brawne. September 1818 inaugurated what has come to be known as the “Great Year.” In this period of creative ferment Keats drafted a first version of Hyperion, then consecutively composed “The Eve of St. Agnes,” “The Eve of St. Mark,” the “Ode to Psyche,” “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode on Melancholy,” “Ode on Indolence,” “Lamia,” “Otho the Great” (a play in collaboration with Brown), the second draft of Hyperion, called The Fall of Hyperion, and “To Autumn.” All this productivity was in the face of financial and personal crises.

“My Posthumous Life”

In the winter of 1819, Keats began “The Cap and Bells,” but ill health caused this poem to remain unfinished and, in fact, terminated his creative work. Keats himself referred to these final months as his “posthumous life.” Keats’s second book of poems, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, was published in July 1820. The last criticism from Blackwood’s was more moderate and other reviews generally favorable, but sales were slow. By the time the reviews were circulating Keats had left for Italy with his friend Joseph Severn. Keats died in Rome 23 February 1821.

With the exception of occasional inclusion in anthology, the work of John Keats largely disappeared from the literary landscape in the decades following his death. Keats’s friends agonized over a proper memorial and wrangled over who was the most proper candidate for writing the poet’s biography, but all plans failed. Keats’s reputation, when he was discussed at all, tended to be the one-dimensional stereotypes of his critics like Lockhart, who had tossed him into “low-class, rowdy and morally depraved” Cockney school, or the equally insensitive perpetuation by his fellow Romantics Shelley (Adonais, 1821) and Byron of the popular view of a fragile, hypersensitive soul too delicate to endure the criticism of The Quarterly Review:

John Keats, who was killed off by one critique,
Just as he really promised something great,
If not intelligible, — without Greek
Contrived to talk about the Gods of late,
Much as they might have been supposed to speak.
Poor fellow! His was an untoward fate: —
’  Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,
Should let itself be snuffed out by an Article.
(Lord Byron. “Don Juan,” stanza 60 of Canto XI)

Were we to offer no more than three life-time editions, a few serial publications, and a handful of contemporary reviews, we would be offering a disservice to scholars, to students, to poetics, and to the poet who died fearing himself “one whose name is writ in water.” The story of John Keats, his poetry and poetics, is one of originality, vitality, and transformation.

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