Section 1 - Biography

Dr. Keats or: how i learned to stop worrying and love the neighbor

John Keats

Section 1

Background

Born: October 31st, 1795 in London.

Important events in his life:

• His father died in April, 1804. His mother remarries later that year.

• Keats' mother disappears in 1805, leaving John with his three siblings under the care of her mother, for three years. John Keats suffers from chronic anxiety. 

• 1809, his mother returns with Tuberculosis; Keats nurses her. 

• At the age of 15, Keats has lost both of his parents.

• He was therefore raised by two appointed guardians, London merchants, who were appointed by Keats' maternal grandmother. 

• When Keats was 21, in 1816, he got his license as an apothecary, having left school 6 years earlier to study medicine at a London hospital. Instead, he became a poet.

• Somewhen around this time, Keats met Leigh Hunt, an influential editor who published two of his sonnets but more importantly introduced him to a circle of literary men, including poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Wordsworth.

• In 1818, a year after the publishing of his first volume of poems, John Keats published Endymion, a poem based on the greek myth of Endymion, the shepherd dear to the moon goddess Selene.

• The Quarterly Reviewand Blackwood’s Magazine, two prominent literary magazines of the time, harshly criticized the poem and the literary circle as a whole, calling them 'the Cockney School of Poetry'. This was because the rhymes indicated a low-class speech (Example:"thorns/fawns" in "Sleep and Poetry")

• John Keats spent the summer of 1818 walking in Northern England and Scotland, having to return to take care of his brother, Tom, who was dying of tuberculosis.

• Around this time, while nursing his brother, Keats met Fanny Brawne. Although it is unclear how they developed intimacy between them, on April 3, 1819, Fanny Brawne and her mother moved next door to John and Tom. 

• During 1820, Keats developed Tuberculosis. 'I know the color of that blood; it is arterial blood.  I cannot be deceived in that color.  That drop of blood is my death warrant.  I must die' he said to his friend Charles Brown after coughing blood. Doctors recommended that he should move to a warmer climate, hence Keats' last months in Rome. 

• February 23, 1821, Keats dies. His tombstone reads, "Here Lies One Whose Name Was Writ In Water" 

Publication of Poems (click on the 'Poems' tab on the website) 

Brawne & Brown

Fanny Brawne was Keats' first real love. She absorbed most of his writing time and became his passion, often leaving his serious writing to compose sonnets for her.

Letter to Fanny Brawne

“The morning is the only proper time for me to write to a beautiful girl whom I love so much…”

“I almost wish we were butterflies and liv'd but three summer days—three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.”

Letter to Charles Brown

“Write to George as soon as you receive this, and tell him how I am, as far as you can guess; - and also a note to my sister - who walks about my imagination like a ghost - she is so like Tom. I can scarcely bid you good bye even in a letter. I always made an awkward bow.”

Charles Armitage Brown was John Keats' closest friend. 
Keats met him during the summer of 1816, when he was 21 and Brown, 30. 
Shortly after this, they were planning a walking tour in Scotland and northern England. 
In 1818, after Keats' brother died of tuberculosis, Keats moved into Brown's half of Wentworth place, where he lived for the next 17 months.