The Life and Legacy of John Keats
Born in 1795, John Keats was the eldest of London innkeepers Thomas and Frances Jennings Keats’s four children. Keats’s father was killed in a fall from a horse in 1804, and his mother died in of tuberculosis in 1810. An orphan at 14, Keats was stricken with a grief which tempered his childhood energies and brought about an early maturity and a sense of responsibility toward his younger siblings, George, Thomas, and Fanny. Their maternal grandmother, Alice Jennings, earned the de facto responsibility of caring for the Keats children, and Jennings appointed merchant Richard Abbey as their guardian. A rigid and disapproving man, Abbey prevented the children from accessing their inheritance, limited Fanny’s correspondence with her brothers once she was forced to live with his family, and probably suppressed much of the history of Keats’s childhood. The necessity of satisfying Abbey fueled
Title page to Poems. London: C. & J. Ollier, 1817. Checklist 1
Keats’s decision to pursue medicine, though he was interested in the field in his own right. At age fifteen he began his apprenticeship to a doctor outside of London, writing poetry on the side. The early years of his medical career proved a miserable time for Keats. As a “dresser” at Guy’s Hospital in an era lacking painkillers and antiseptics, Keats’s duties included the physical restraint of patients during surgery and subsequent cleaning and re-bandaging of their putrid and often infected wounds. The overwhelming spectrum of human suffering and the lack of time to write brought about hypochondria in Keats, and more alarmingly, periodic descents into suicidal depression. Although Keats’s stint in medical work damaged his mental health and limited the time he could devote to poetry, he developed an increasing number of social connections that widened his literary prospects. During his first years of medical work in London, Keats befriended Leigh Hunt and Joseph Severn, both of whom would become influential figures throughout the remainder of his short life. (Incidentally, Hunt’s periodical The Examiner granted Keats his first publication, “To Solitude’ (1816), before their acquaintance.) Keats was known for his generous spirit, vivacity, and rich sense of humor—all qualities which his posthumous idealization as a frail genius fails to reveal. Though his publications were still quite limited, the support, in print and through companionship, of Hunt and others led Keats to conclude that that he could sustain a poetic career without his medical wages. In the autumn of 1816 his childhood friend Charles Cowden Clarke shared his copy of Chapman’s
Title page to Endymion. London: Taylor and Hessey, 1818. Checklist 2
translation of Homer with Keats, which stirred the poet so deeply that he wrote the beautiful “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” that evening. He finished it in time to ensure that a copy arrived at Clarke’s by ten o’clock the next morning. The Examiner hailed it as evidence of Keats’s potential as a chief member in a new poetic order. In spite of the public support of proponents like Hunt, Keats’s first book, Poems by John Keats (1817), did not sell well. Nor would Endymion, his response to a poetic challenge from Shelley (with whom he maintained a lifelong and complicated rivalry). In fact, Endymion became the target of insulting, politically-motivated critical attacks by Tory magazines such as Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, The Quarterly Review, and The British Critic intended to harm Hunt’s reputation by using Keats as a whipping boy, mocking his origins, his medical training, and even his short stature. While the popular notion that this critical savagery killed Keats is the product of sentimental hagiography and Byronic wisecracking, it undoubtedly rattled young poet, outwardly composed though he remained. Bad reviews and limited funds were not the only afflictions of 1818. Keats contracted a sore throat on a walking tour of Ireland and Scotland he took with close friend Charles Armitage Brown, a symptom which must have felt particularly ominous as he cared for his brother, Tom, who died of tuberculosis later that year. His other brother, George Keats, moved to America, and John had little access to his sister Fanny due to her controlling guardian, Abbey. Also in 1818 Keats met Brown’s tenant Fanny Brawne. She would ultimately become the love of his life and the inspiration for poems like “Bright Star,’ though worries over Tom’s health and his own probably kept him from paying much attention to her at first. In fact, he was determined to dislike her. It seems, however, that Keats was attempting to veil his burgeoning attraction to Fanny, to whom he was more vulnerable than he perhaps wished to admit.
As Keats’s affection for Fanny grew more obvious, many of his friends resisted the attachment, mostly on the grounds that it would hinder his poetry. The spring and summer of 1819 nevertheless proved a highly productive time for Keats, yielding “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” and “Ode to Psyche,” among others. However, by the end of the summer Keats’s sore throat and financial worries returned. He took up small quarters on the Isle of Wight and began furiously writing “Lamia,” “Hyperion” and his play Otho, and then moved to Winchester, where he finished “Lamia” and added to “The Eve of St. Agnes.” His tension regarding his feelings for Fanny Brawne continued, and at times he would stir himself into a frenzy of misogynistic jealousy. Keats’s attitude toward women was complicated and changeable throughout his life. While we cannot be sure of his sexual history, his letters suggest that, in keeping with the times, he both visited
Title page to Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems. London, Taylor and Hessey, 1820. Checklist 3
prostitutes and expected an almost otherworldly purity from the women in his social and domestic circle. He wrote that he struggled to settle his mind about women, by turns adoring them as angels and reviling them as whores. His position on literary women was equally mixed. He initially admired Mary Tighe, an Irish poet important to many of the Romantics, but eventually disavowed her, labeling her a “bluestocking,” which was his way of saying she claimed a type of intellectualism which was, for him, an offense against natural femininity. He called another eminent female intellectual, Elizabeth Montagu, part of “a set of Devils, whom I detest so much that I almost hunger after an acherontic promotion to a Torturer, purposely for their accommodation; These Devils are a set of Women, who having taken a snack or Luncheon of Literary scraps, set themselves up for towers of Babel in Languages Sapphos in Poetry—Euclids in Geometry—and everything in nothing.” In contrast, he praised Katherine Philips, who wrote relational poetry and distributed it privately, as an example of how a female poet should behave. Keats’s misogyny resulted in deeply conflicted responses toward Fanny Brawne, but there is no doubt that he was inextricably drawn to her. He returned to Fanny blissfully in October 1819, but his happiness was short-lived. In February of 1820 Keats coughed up blood. He was too medically knowledgeable to deny what the symptoms implied: “I know the colour of that blood’ he told Brown, “I cannot be deceived in that colour; — that drop of blood is my death warrant; — I must die.” In June, Keats hemorrhaged, and was put under the care of Hunt.
A series of circumstances led to Keats moving from the Hunt home to the Brawne’s, even though it violated rules of conduct for a man to live in the same household as his sweetheart. Despite the risk of social censure, however, Keats considered those few weeks the happiest of his life. It soon became clear that if Keats were to have any hope of recovery, he would have to flee to the drier air of Italy, which would necessitate parting from Fanny Brawne. Keats was known for his unwillingness to express personal emotion,
Illustration by Ralph Fletcher Seymour for a 1900 edition of The Eve of Saint Agnes. Checklist 51
so Hunt was surprised to hear Keats say that he was dying of a broken heart. Arrangements were quickly made for Keats to travel to Rome, accompanied by Severn. His parting from Fanny Brawne at the coach stop was nearly silent in its agony; they each knew that it would be the last time they would see each other, and both were determined to keep composed for the sake of the other. Upon Keats’s and Severn’s arrival in Italy, Keats acknowledged the fascinations of the place, but could not find it in himself to enjoy them. He’d suffered another serious hemorrhage, and he wrote anguished letters to Brown about his longing for Fanny Brawne, about whom he had not told Severn. When he saw the imminently suitable housing his doctor had arranged for him and Severn near Rome’s Spanish Steps, however, Keats vowed once again to do his best to heal. Keats and Severn toured about Rome and Keats even attempted some poetry, and yet while he acted bravely, his letters more than hint at his suffering, which would reach its apex in January and be followed by resignation and decline. On the 30th of November, just a little more than a month after arriving in Italy, Keats wrote his last letter. Addressing Brown, he reminisced about Fanny, asked to be remembered to his friends and family, and closed “I can scarcely bid you good bye even in a letter. I always made an awkward bow. God bless you! John Keats!’ It was not until the 23rd of February that Keats announced that he had reached his final moments, but he lingered a few hours and Severn succumbed to exhaustion. When Severn awoke, Keats was lying so serenely that his friend at first mistook death for sleep. In a limited autopsy, his doctor discovered that Keats’s lungs had been virtually destroyed in the worst case of consumption he had ever seen. He could not imagine how Keats had even lived his twenty-five years and four months. Keats was buried on the morning of the 26th of February in the Protestant cemetery in Rome, and according to his wishes he was laid to rest with Fanny Brawne’s unopened letters, a lock of her hair, and a purse made by Fanny Keats. His tombstone reads “Here lies one whose name was writ in water” as he requested, but also additional lines blaming his death on bad press, which Brown would later regret writing. At first Keats’ work languished in almost entire obscurity, his reputation actually diminished by Shelley’s elegy Adonais, which glosses over Keats’s vibrant personality in favor of depicting a pure soul too good for the world who, in this abstracted status, could symbolize oppressed artists. Similar comments from Hunt, Byron, Hazlitt, and DeQuincy—most of whom did not actually know Keats well—reinforced the myth. Keats’s friends were slow to reach consensus on how to best establish his poetic significance, and for 20 years no edition of his work save an entry in an anthology was published. The now relatively unknown poet Thomas Hood published poems in the style of Keats in 1827, but at that time virtually no one else was reading Keats. A few years later Keats came to the
From a framed early twentieth-century
replica of Joseph Severn's
deathbed watercolor of Keats,
housed in the Rare Book Collection.attention of Tennyson, who advocated Keats even though it gained him similarly bad reviews from the Tory periodicals which so brutally treated Keats. In 1848, Richard Monckton Milnes published a biography of Keats which sought to set the record straight, and to his surprise it was popularly received. Following the lead of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Victorian tastes tended to emphasize his lush narrative poems (and their elements of floral sweetness) over the great odes for which he is best loved in the twentieth-century, but in any case, by the middle of the nineteenth century Keats’s reputation was secure. Andrew Motion draws his biography of Keats toward closure by reflecting on Keats’s legacy: “‘How long is this posthumous life of mine to last?’ Keats asked [his doctor] in Rome. He meant that he longed to die. His readers have answered him in ways he did not expect. They have made him immortal” (577).
Back to Top | Next Section: Presenting John Keats: Work and Reappraisal
