John Keats Biography Quotes 31 Report mistakes

Early Life and Family
John Keats was born in London on 31 October 1795 to Thomas Keats and Frances Jennings. His early childhood was marked by both affection and instability. His father, who worked at a livery stable, died in 1804 after a fall from a horse, and his mother died in 1814 from tuberculosis, a loss that would cast a long shadow over his imagination and later his health. Keats was the eldest of four surviving children: George, Thomas (Tom), and Frances Mary (Fanny). After their parents died, the siblings came under the guardianship of Richard Abbey, a tea dealer whose cautious control of the Keats inheritance left John chronically anxious about money and independence.

Education and Medical Training
Keats was educated at Clarke's School in Enfield, where the headmaster's son, Charles Cowden Clarke, became a mentor and opened his mind to literature, especially Edmund Spenser. The enchantment of Spenser's verse was decisive: Keats began to write poems, finding in dense, sensuous language a medium for feeling and thought. Yet necessity pointed him toward a practical profession. He apprenticed to a surgeon-apothecary and later studied at Guy's Hospital, qualifying to practice. He was competent and hardworking, but the vocation never claimed his heart. Even as he attended lectures and assisted in operations, he pursued poetry with mounting seriousness.

Entry into the Literary World
Keats's literary path quickened when he entered Leigh Hunt's circle. Hunt, editor of the Examiner and a champion of liberal letters, published Keats's early work and ushered him into a world of talk, friendship, and ambition. Benjamin Robert Haydon, the painter, encouraged him and introduced him to figures such as William Wordsworth and Charles Lamb. With Clarke's guidance, Keats read Homer in George Chapman's translation and produced the sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer (1816), a small masterpiece of discovery and awe. His first book, Poems (1817), showed promise without mastery. Endymion (1818), a mythic romance in four books, announced larger ambitions in a luxuriant style that exposed him to sharp attacks from conservative reviewers, notably in Blackwood's Magazine and the Quarterly Review, who mocked Hunt's circle as the Cockney School.

Major Works and Poetic Development
Criticism did not divert Keats from the strenuous apprenticeship he set for himself. He pressed forward with narratives and fragments, including Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil, The Eve of St Agnes, Lamia, and the two versions of the unfinished Hyperion. In a famous letter to his brothers in 1817 he defined Negative Capability, the capacity to remain in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without irritable reaching after fact and reason. That ideal informed the astonishing run of poems in 1819, his annus mirabilis: Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, To Autumn, Ode on Melancholy, and others. These works balance sensuous immediacy with philosophical poise, finding forms that hold conflicting truths in a single, resonant poise. To Autumn, written after the harvest near his Hampstead home, is at once particular and timeless, the culmination of his search for a mature music. Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion grapple with suffering, power, and artistic vision; though unfinished, they show his reach toward epic seriousness.

Friendships, Love, and Personal Trials
Keats's family remained central. He nursed his brother Tom through the last stages of tuberculosis until Tom died in 1818, an ordeal of tenderness and exhaustion. His brother George emigrated to America with his wife, Georgiana, a move that strained finances and correspondence but kept affection alive across the Atlantic. In Hampstead, Keats boarded with Charles Armitage Brown at Wentworth Place, where he found a sustaining friendship and a stable base for work. There he met Fanny Brawne, a lively, intelligent neighbor with whom he fell deeply in love. Their attachment grew into an informal engagement, yet money, illness, and circumstance blocked marriage. The intensity of his letters to Brawne, and to friends and family, has made his correspondence one of the great bodies of English letters. He was supported by sympathetic publishers, John Taylor and James Hessey, and by friends like Hunt and Haydon; Percy Bysshe Shelley admired his genius and later offered him refuge in Italy.

Travel, Illness, and the Last Year
In 1818 Keats undertook a walking tour of northern England and Scotland with Brown, a strenuous journey that tested his health. By early 1820 he suffered severe hemorrhages, signs that the disease that killed his mother and brother had claimed him. Medical advice urged a warmer climate. With the painter Joseph Severn as companion, he sailed for Italy in the autumn of 1820, endured quarantine near Naples, and settled in Rome under the care of Dr. James Clark. Keats lodged in a small apartment overlooking the Spanish Steps. Severn tended him with remarkable devotion through a cruel winter of decline. Keats died in Rome on 23 February 1821, aged twenty-five, and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery. The stone bears the epitaph he chose: Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.

Reputation and Legacy
During his lifetime Keats knew little but struggle, doubt, and intermittent encouragement. After his death, his friends helped secure his reputation. Shelley commemorated him in Adonais, an elegy of grief and defense. Over the decades, readers and critics came to see that the very qualities attacked by his early detractors were signs of original power: the tactile richness of his imagery, the disciplined musicality of his verse, and the philosophical depth he achieved without sacrificing sensuous detail. The 1820 volume, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems, along with the great odes, became central to English poetry. Keats's reflections on Negative Capability and on the soul-making power of suffering, expressed in letters to his brothers and to George and Georgiana, have continued to shape ideas about imagination and art. The friendships that sustained him, Hunt, Haydon, Brown, Taylor, Hessey, Severn, and the love of Fanny Brawne stand within his story not as adornments but as the living context of his work. He left a compact, incandescent body of poetry and prose that, though fashioned in a few short years, has remained a touchstone for lyric intensity and human sympathy.

Our collection contains 31 quotes who is written by John, under the main topics: Motivational - Wisdom - Truth - Art - Love.

Other people realated to John: Percy Bysshe Shelley (Poet), Amy Lowell (Poet), Dan Simmons (Author), Horace Smith (Poet), Andrew Motion (Poet)