Life

Born in a well-off but humble family, Keats lost his father at an early age, while tuberculosis caused his mother and brother's death before eventually killing him at only 25.

He left school at 16 and began his apprenticeship as an apothecary-surgeon. Though he was appointed one in 1816, he soon left his career in order to devote himself entirely to poetry. He was soon to enter the literary circle that gathered around the radical critic end editor Leigh Hunt and his magazine The Examiner, and this acquaintance called upon him and his early work the cynic attacks of Tory literary press, namely of Blackwood's Magazine and The Quarterly Review.

After having set himself on a walking tour in the Scottish Highlands during the year 1818, he suffered from a fast health deterioration due to TB. Moreover, his situation was made all the more delicate by his brother Tom's death from the same illness and by the impossibility to fulfil his love for Fanny Brawne (to whom he wrote some beautiful and highly appreciated letters).

When the symptoms of consumption became overt, he moved to Rome, where he eventually met his death and was buried.

(Portrait by Charles Brown, 1819)

Main works and stylistic features

Most of Keats masterpieces were composed in a very short time span between 1816 and his golden year 1819. They were to remain known inside a restricted circle until their rediscovery by Matthew Arnold half a century later.

The least committed to politics of the three young Romantics, Keats perceived poetry as an ideal world of beauty and harmony, surrounded by that vast ocean of pain and sadness that is life. The measure of it lies in a symbolic reinterpretation of the Middle Ages and, above all, in a deep love for the values and canons of ancient Greek art and literature (his fascination for the Elgin Marbles is proverbial). Thus, nature as well as art are self-fulfilling and independent from the poet's inner feelings and perceptions; moreover, in order to understand them fully, the poet must be endowed with what he called negative capability: she/he must be capable of leaving aside her/his personal point of view and to identify her/himself fully with the source of inspiration.

Sources for this topic:

• Wikipedia - the Free Encyclopedia: biography, criticism, sources and much more. [E1] [I1] [F1] [ES1]
• John-Keats.com: biography and texts freely available. [E2]
• The Literature Network: a complete survey on the author's works with free texts available [E3]