Author Keats John

was born in central London, (though there is no clear evidence exactly where) [2]. His father was working as an ostler at the Hoop and Swan pub when John Keats was born, an establishment Thomas later managed and where the growing family would live for some years, now the "Keats at the Globe", a few yards from modern day Moorgate station. Keats was baptised at St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate and sent to a local dame school as an infant. In the summer of 1803, he was sent to board, with his brother George, at the Clark school in Enfield run by headmaster John Clarke, close to his grandparents' house in Ponders End. On 15 April 1804, only nine months after Keats had started at Enfield, his father died of a fractured skull, falling from his horse on a return visit to the school. Thomas died intestate. Frances remarried two months afterwards, but quickly left the new husband and, with her four children, went to live with the children's grandmother, Alice Jennings, in the village of Edmonton, London [3] In March 1810, when Keats was fourteen, his mother died, leaving the children in the custody of their grandmother. Jennings appointed two guardians to take care of her new charges. In autumn 1810, Keats was removed from Clarke's school to become a surgeon's apprentice at Thomas Hammond's apothecary shop in Edmonton[4]. Charles Cowden Clarke, a close school friend of Keats, described this time as "the most placid time in [Keats'] painful life". [5] He lodged with Hammond and slept in the attic above the surgery. His first surviving poem - An Imitation of Spenser - comes in 1814, when Keats was nineteen. On 1 October 1815, Keats registered to become a student at Guy's Hospital (now part of King's College London) where he would study for five years. Within a month of starting, he was accepted for a 'dressership' position within the hospital - a significant promotion, which he took up in March the following year. During his time at Guys, he lived in various rooms near London Bridge. He was also devoting increasing time to the study of literature. On 5 May 1816, Leigh Hunt, a poet and critic greatly admired by Keats, agreed to publish the sonnet O Solitude. Hunt's Examiner was "the leading liberal magazine of the day". [6] It is the first appearance of Keats' poems in print and Charles Cowden Clarke refers to it as his friend's "red letter day" [7], first proof that John's ambitions were not ridiculous. In the summer of that year he went down to the coastal town of Margate with Clarke to write. Here he began Calidore and initiated the era of his great letter writing. In October, Clarke personally introduced Keats to Leigh Hunt and five months later, on March 3 1817, Poems, his first volume of verse, was published. [8] It was a critical failure. Hunt introduced Keats to many influential men in his circle, including editor of The Times Thomas Barnes, writer Charles Lamb, conductor Vincent Novello and poet John Hamilton Reynolds, who would become a close friend. [9] Hunt went on to publish an essay on Three Young Poets (Shelley, Keats and Reynolds), along with the sonnet on Chapman's Homer, promising great things to come. [10] Andrew Motion suggests in his biography that this represents a decisive turning point for Keats as "he was now established in the eyes of the world as a member of, what Hunt called, 'a new school of poetry' ". [11] Endymion, on its eventual publication, was also ferociously damned by the critics, giving rise to Byron's quip that Keats was ultimately "snuffed out by an article." William Gifford wrote in The Quarterly Review: "It is not that Mr. Keats (if that be his real name, for we almost doubt that any man in his senses would put his real name to such a rhapsody) -- it is not, we say, that the author has not powers of language, rays of fancy, and gleams of genius. He has all these; but he is unhappily a disciple of the new school of what has been somewhere called 'Cockney Poetry,' which may be defined to consist of the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language. ... He seems to us to write a line at random, and then he follows, not the thought excited by this line, but that suggested by the rhyme with which it concludes. There is hardly a complete couplet enclosing a complete idea in the whole book. He wonders from one subject to another, from the association, not of ideas, but of sounds ..."[12][13] John Gibson Lockhart wrote in Blackwoods Magazine "To witness the disease of any human understanding, however feeble, is distressing; but the spectacle of an able mind reduced to a state of insanity is of course ten times more afflicting. It is with such sorrow as this that we have contemplated the case of Mr John Keats. ... He was bound apprentice some years ago to a worthy apothecary in town. But all has been undone by a sudden attack of the malady. ... For some time we were in hopes, that he might get off with a violent fit or two; but of late the symptoms are terrible. The phrenzy of the "Poems" was bad enough in its way; but it did not alarm us half so seriously as the calm, settled, imperturbable drivelling idiocy of Endymion.[...] Back to the [apothecary] shop Mr John, back to ‘plasters, pills, and ointment boxes.’"[14] [15] It was Lockhart at Blackwoods that had coined the defamatory term "the Cockney School" for Hunt and his circle, including Hazlitt and, squarely, Keats. The dismissal was as much political as literary - aimed at upstart young writers deemed 'uncooth' for their lack of education and 'low diction'. They had not attended Eton, Harrow or Oxbridge colleges - they were not from the upper classes. Unhappy with living in London and in bad health, Keats moved into rooms at 1 Well Walk, in April 1817, with his brothers. Both John and George nursed their brother Tom, who was suffering from tuberculosis. The house in Hampstead was close to Hunt and others from his circle, as well as the senior poet Coleridge, living in Highgate. [16] In June 1818, Keats began a walking journey around Scotland, Ireland and the lake district with his friend Charles Armitage Brown. George and his wife Georgina accompanied them as far as Lancaster and then headed to Liverpool, from where the couple would emigrate to America. (They lived in Ohio and Louisville, Kentucky until 1841 when George's investments went bad. Like both his brothers, he would die penniless and racked by tuberculosis.[17][18] There would be no effective treatment for the disease till 1921.) In July, while on Mull for the walking tour, Keats caught a bad cold and by August Brown writes that his friend "was too thin and fevered to proceed on the journey" [19]. On his return south, Keats continued to nurse Tom, continuously exposing himself to the highly infectious disease. Motion argues "It was on Mull that Keats' short life started to end, and his slow death began", [20] although biographers disagree on when the first signs of tuberculosis appear. 'Consumption' was not identified as a single disease till 1820 [21] and there was considerable stigma attached to the infection - often being associated with weakness, repressed sexual passion or masturbation. Keats "refuses to give it a name" in his letters. [22][23] Tom Keats died on 1 December. John Keats moved again, to live in Brown's house, the newly built, Wentworth Place, also on the edge of Hampstead Heath, slightly south of Well Walk. The Keats poems Fancy and Bards of passion and of mirth were inspired by the gardens. [24] Keats composed five of his six great odes in April and May and, although it is debated in which order they were written, Ode to Psyche starts the series. According to Brown, Ode to a Nightingale was composed under their mulberry tree. He says 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 [25] Dilke, co-owner of the house, strenuously denied the story, as it was printed in Milnes' 1848 biography of Keats, and dismissed it as "pure delusion". Wentworth Place now houses the Keats' House museum. At this time he met the eighteen year old Frances (Fanny) Brawne, who eventually lived next door to Wentworth Place with her widowed mother. Fanny was also a Londoner - born in the hamlet of West End near Hampstead on 9 August 1800. Her grandfather had run a London inn, as Keats' father had done, and had lost several members of her family to tuberculosis. She also shared her christian name with the sister and mother of Keats. He fell in love with Fanny and a year later they were betrothed, although the engagement was later broken off as his health worsened. Fanny's letters to Keats were, as the poet had requested, destroyed upon his death. However, in 1937, a collection of 31 letters, written by Fanny Brawne to Frances, the sister of Keats, was published by Oxford University Press.