John Keats



John Keats (October 31, 1795 -  February 23, 1821) was an English Romantic poet. Along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, he was one of the key figures in the second generation of the Romantic movement, despite the fact that his work had been in publication for only four years before his death. During his life, his poems were not generally well received by critics; however, after his death, his reputation grew to the extent that by the end of the 19th century he had become one of the most beloved of all English poets. He has had a significant influence on a diverse range of later poets and writers: Jorge Luis Borges, for instance, stated that his first encounter with Keats was the most significant literary experience of his life.

The poetry of Keats is characterized by sensual imagery, most notably in the series of odes. Today his poems and letters are some of the most popular and analyzed in English literature.

Early life
John Keats was born on 31 October 1795 to Thomas and Frances Jennings Keats. He was the eldest of their four surviving children, George (1797-1841), Thomas (1799-1818), and Frances Mary "Fanny" (1803-89). A son was also lost in infancy. John was born in central London, although there is no clear evidence of the exact location. His father at first worked as a hostler at the stables attached to the Swan and Hoop inn, an establishment Thomas later managed and where the growing family would live for some years. The Keats at the Globe pub now occupies the site, 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, unable to attend Eton or Harrow due to the expense, he was sent to board at John Clarke's school in Enfield, close to his grandparents' house. The small school had a liberal and progressive outlook, with a curriculum ahead of its time, a place altogether more modern than the larger, more prestigious schools. In the family atmosphere at Clarke's, Keats developed an interest in classics and history which would stay with him throughout his short life. The headmaster's son, Charles Cowden Clarke, would become an important influence, mentor and friend, introducing Keats to Renaissance literature including Tasso, Spenser and Chapman's translations. The instability of Keats's childhood gave rise to a volatile character "always in extremes", given to indolence and fighting. However at 13 he began focusing his energy towards reading and study, winning his first academic prize in midsummer 1809.

In April 1804, when Keats was eight, his father was killed, fracturing his skull after falling from his horse on a return visit to the school. Thomas died intestate. Frances remarried two months later, but left her new husband soon afterwards, her four children going to live with the children's grandmother, Alice Jennings, in the village of Edmonton. In March 1810, when Keats was 14, his mother died of tuberculosis leaving the children in the custody of their grandmother who appointed two guardians to take care of the children. That autumn, Keats was removed from Clarke's school to apprentice with Thomas Hammond, a surgeon and apothecary, lodging in the attic above the surgery until 1813. Cowden Clarke, who remained a close friend of Keats, described this as "the most placid time in Keats's life".

Early career
Having finished his apprenticeship with Hammond, Keats registered as a medical student at Guy's Hospital (now part of King's College London) and began there in October 1815. Within a month of starting, he was accepted for a dressership position within the hospital, the equivalent of a junior house surgeon. It was a significant promotion marking a distinct talent for medicine, the role coming with increased responsibility and workload. His long and expensive medical training with Hammond and at Guys gave his family to assume this would be his lifelong career, assuring financial security.

Keats's first surviving poem, An Imitation of Spenser, was written in 1814, when Keats was 19. His medical career took up increasing amounts of his writing time and exacerbated his ambivalence to anything other than poetry. Strongly drawn by ambition, inspired by fellow poets such as Leigh Hunt and Byron, and beleaguered by family financial crises that continued to the end of his life, he suffered periods of depression. His brother George wrote that John "feared that he should never be a poet, & if he was not he would destroy himself". In 1816, Keats received his apothecary's licence but before the end of the year he announced to his guardian that he had resolved to be a poet, not a surgeon. Though he continued his work and training at Guy's, Keats was devoting increasing time to the study of literature. In May 1816, Leigh Hunt agreed to publish the sonnet O Solitude in his magazine The Examiner, a leading liberal magazine of the day. It is the first appearance of Keats's poems in print and Charles Cowden Clarke refers to it as his friend's red letter day, first proof that Keats's ambitions were valid. In the summer of that year he went down to the coastal town of Margate with Clarke to write. There he began Calidore and initiated the era of his great letter writing.

In October, Clarke introduced Keats to the influential Hunt, a close friend of Byron and Shelley. Five months later Poems, the first volume of Keats verse, was published, which included "I stood tiptoe" and "Sleep and Poetry". It was a critical failure, arousing no interest, his publishers feeling ashamed of the book. Still, Hunt went on to publish the essay Three Young Poets (Shelley, Keats and Reynolds), along with the sonnet "on Chapman's Homer," promising great things to come. He introduced Keats to many prominent 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. It was a decisive turning point for Keats, establishing him in the public eye as a figure in, what Hunt termed, 'a new school of poetry'. At this time Keats writes to his friend Bailey "I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the imagination. What imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth". This would eventually transmute into the concluding lines of Ode on a Grecian Urn " 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' - that is all / you know on earth, and all ye need to know".

In bad health and unhappy with living in London, Keats moved with his brothers into rooms at 1 Well Walk in April 1817. 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 who at the time lived in Highgate. 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 of Keats's brothers, they died penniless and racked by tuberculosis. There would be no effective treatment for the disease until 1921. In July, while on the Isle of Mull for the walking tour, Keats caught a bad cold and "was too thin and fevered to proceed on the journey". On his return south, Keats continued to nurse Tom, exposing himself to the highly infectious disease. Some biographers suggest that this is when tuberculosis, his "family disease", first takes hold. Tom Keats died on 1 December 1818.

Wentworth Place
John Keats moved to the newly built Wentworth Place, owned by his friend Charles Armitage Brown, also on the edge of Hampstead Heath, a ten-minute walk south of his old home in Well Walk. This winter of 1818-19, though troubled, marks the beginning of Keats's annus mirabilis in which he wrote his most mature work. He had been greatly inspired by a series of recent lectures by Hazlitt on English poets and poetic identity and met with Wordsworth. In December he attended Haydon's 'immortal dinner', along with Wordsworth and Charles Lamb.

Keats composed five of his six great odes there 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 a mulberry tree in the garden. Brown wrote, "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." Dilke, co-owner of the house, strenuously denied the story, printed in Milnes' 1848 biography of Keats, dismissing it as pure delusion.

The new and progressive firm Taylor and Hessey published Endymion, dedicated to Thomas Chatterton. It was damned by the critics, giving rise to Byron's quip that Keats was ultimately "snuffed out by an article". One particularly harsh review by John Wilson Croker appeared in the April 1818 edition of The Quarterly Review "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 [...] There is hardly a complete couplet enclosing a complete idea in the whole book. He wanders from one subject to another, from the association, not of ideas, but of sounds." John Gibson Lockhart wrote in Blackwood's 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. [...] It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the [apothecary] shop Mr John, back to 'plasters, pills, and ointment boxes'. It was Lockhart at Blackwoods who had coined the defamatory term "the Cockney School" for Hunt and his circle, including William Hazlitt and, squarely, Keats. The dismissal was as much political as literary - aimed at upstart young writers deemed uncouth for their lack of education, non-formal rhyming and "low diction". They had not attended Eton, Harrow or Oxbridge colleges and they were not from the upper classes.

In 1819, Keats wrote "The Eve of St. Agnes", "La Belle Dame sans Merci", "Hyperion", "Lamia" and Otho (critically damned and not dramatised until 1950). The poems "Fancy" and "Bards of passion and of mirth" were inspired by the gardens. In September, very short of money, he approached his publishers with a new book of poems. They were unimpressed with the collection, finding the presented versions of "Lamia" confusing, and describing "St Agnes" as having a "sense of pettish disgust" and "a 'Don Juan' style of mingling up sentiment and sneering" concluding it was "a poem unfit for ladies". The final volume Keats lived to see, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, was eventually published in July 1820. It received greater acclaim than had Endymion or Poems, finding favourable notices in both The Examiner and Edinburgh Review.

Wentworth Place now houses the Keats House museum.



Fanny Brawne and Isabella Jones
Letters and poem drafts suggest that Keats first met Frances (Fanny) Brawne between September and November 1818. It is likely that the 18-year-old Brawne was visiting the Dilke family at Wentworth Place, before she lived there. Like Keats, Brawne was a Londoner, born in the hamlet of West End near Hampstead on 9 August 1800. Her grandfather had kept a London inn, as Keats's father had done, and had also lost several members of her family to tuberculosis. She shared her first name with both Keats's sister and mother. Brawne had a talent for dress-making and languages. She describes herself as having "a natural theatrical bent". During November 1818 an intimacy sprang up between Keats and Brawne but was very much shadowed by the impending death of Tom Keats, whom John was nursing.

That year, he met the beautiful, talented and witty Isabella Jones, for whom he also felt a conflicted passion. He had met her in Hastings while on holiday in June. He "frequented her rooms" in the winter of 1818-1819, and says in his letters to George that he "warmed with her" and "kissed her". It is unclear how close they ultimately became and biographers debate how influential she was to Keats's writing. Gittings maintained that The Eve of St. Agnes and The Eve of St Mark were suggested by her, that the lyric Hush, Hush! ["o sweet Isabel"] was about her and the first version of Bright Star might well have been for her.

On 3 April 1819, Brawne and her widowed mother moved into the other half of Dilke's Wentworth Place and Keats and Brawne were able to see each other every day. Keats began to lend Brawne books, such as Dante's Inferno, and they would read together. He gave her the love sonnet "Bright Star" (perhaps revised for her) as a declaration. It was a work in progress and he continued to work on the poem until the last months of his life and the poem came to be associated with their relationship. "All his desires were concentrated on Fanny". From this point we have no documented mention of Isabella Jones again. Sometime before the end of June, he arrived at some sort of understanding with Brawne, far from a formal engagement as he still had too little to offer, with no prospects and financial stricture. Keats endured great conflict knowing his expectations as a struggling poet in increasingly hard straits would preclude marriage to Brawne. Their love remained unconsummated; jealousy for his 'star' began to gnaw at him. Darkness, disease and depression were around him, and are reflected in poems of the time such as The Eve of St. Agnes and La Belle Dame sans Merci where love and death both stalk. "I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks;" he wrote to her, "...your loveliness, and the hour of my death". Keats writes to Brawne in one of his many hundreds of notes and letters: "My love has made me selfish. I cannot exist without you - I am forgetful of every thing but seeing you again - my Life seems to stop there - I see no further. You have absorb'd me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving - I should be exquisitely miserable without the hope of soon seeing you. [...] I have been astonished that Men could die Martyrs for religion - I have shudder'd at it - I shudder no more - I could be martyr'd for my Religion - Love is my religion - I could die for that - I could die for you." (Letter, 13 October 1819). Tuberculosis took hold and he was advised to move to a warmer country by his doctors. In September 1820 Keats left for Rome and they both knew it was very likely they'd never see each other again. He died there five months later. None of Brawne's letters to Keats survive, though we have his own letters. As the poet had requested, Brawne's were destroyed upon his death. She stayed in mourning for Keats for six years. In 1833, more than 12 years after his death, she married and went on to have three children, outliving Keats by more than 40 years. The 2009 film Bright Star, written and directed by Jane Campion, focuses on Keats' relationship with Fanny Brawne.

Death
During 1820, Keats displayed increasingly serious symptoms of tuberculosis, to the extent that he suffered two lung haemorrhages in the first few days of February. He lost large amounts of blood and was bled further by the attending physician. Hunt nursed him in London for much of the summer. At the suggestion of his doctors, he agreed to move to Italy with his friend Joseph Severn. On 13 September, they left for Gravesend and four days later boarded the sailing brig The Maria Crowther. Keats wrote his final revisions of "Bright Star" aboard the ship. The journey was a minor catastrophe: storms broke out followed by a dead calm that slowed the ship's progress. When it finally docked in Naples, the ship was held in quarantine for ten days because of a suspected outbreak of cholera in Britain. Keats reached Rome on November 14 by which time all hope of a warmer climate had evaporated.

On arrival in Italy, he moved into a villa on the Spanish Steps in Rome, today the Keats-Shelley Memorial House museum. Despite care from Severn and Dr. James Clark, his health rapidly deteriorated. The medical attention Keats received may have hastened his death. In November 1820, Clark declared that the source of his illness was "mental exertion" and that the source was largely situated in his stomach. Clark eventually diagnosed consumption (tuberculosis) and placed Keats on a starvation diet of an anchovy and a piece of bread a day intended to reduce the blood flow to his stomach. He also bled the poet; a standard treatment of the day, but likely a significant contributor to Keats's weakness. Keats's friend Brown writes: "They could have used opium in small doses, and Keats had asked Severn to buy a bottle of opium when they were setting off on their voyage. What Severn didn't realise was that Keats saw it as a possible resource if he wanted to commit suicide. He tried to get the bottle from Severn on the voyage but Severn wouldn't let him have it. Then in Rome he tried again. [...] Severn was in such a quandary he didn't know what to do, so in the end he went to the doctor who took it away. As a result Keats went through dreadful agonies with nothing to ease the pain at all." Keats was furious with both Severn and Clarke when they refused laudanum (opium). He repeatedly demanded "how long is this posthumous existence of mine to go on?". Severn writes, "Keats raves till I am in a complete tremble for him," continuing, "about four, the approaches of death came on. [Keats said] 'Severn - I - lift me up - I am dying - I shall die easy; don't be frightened - be firm, and thank God it has come.' I lifted him up in my arms. The phlegm seem'd boiling in his throat, and increased until eleven, when he gradually sank into death, so quiet, that I still thought he slept." He died on 23 February 1821 and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome. His last request was to be placed under an unnamed tombstone which contained only the words (in pentameter), "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." Severn and Brown erected the stone, which under a relief of a lyre with broken strings, contains the epitaph: This Grave / contains all that was Mortal / of a / Young English Poet / Who / on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his Heart / at the Malicious Power of his Enemies / Desired / these Words to be / engraven on his Tomb Stone: / ''Here lies One / Whose Name was writ in Water. 24 February 1821"

There is a discrepancy of one day between the official date of death and the grave marking. Severn and Brown had added their lines to the stone in protest at the critical reception of Keats's work. Hunt blamed his death on the scathing attack of "Endymion" by the Quarterly Review. Seven weeks after the funeral, Shelley memorialised Keats in his poem AdonaÃ¯s. Clark saw to the planting of daisies on the grave, saying that Keats would have wished it. For public health reasons, the Italian health authorities burned the furniture in Keats's room, scraped the walls, made new windows, doors and flooring. The ashes of Shelley (d. 8 July 1822), one of Keats's most fervent champions, are also buried there along with Severn (d. 3 August 1879) who nursed Keats to the end. Describing the vista of the site today, Marsh wrote, "In the old part of the graveyard, barely a field when Keats was buried here, there are now umbrella pines, myrtle shrubs, roses, and carpets of wild violets".

Poetry


When Keats died at the age of 25, he had been seriously writing poetry for only about six years, from 1814 until the summer of 1820, and publishing for four. It is believed that, in his lifetime, sales of Keats's three volumes of poetry amounted to only 200 copies. His first poem, the sonnet O Solitude appeared in the Examiner in May 1816, while his collection Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and other poems was published in July 1820 before his final voyage to Rome. The compression of his poetic apprenticeship and maturity into so short a time is just one remarkable aspect of Keats's work. Although he was prolific during his short writing life, and is now one of the most studied and admired of British poets, his reputation rests on a small body of work, centred on the Odes, and it was only in the creative outpouring in the last years of his short life that he was able to express in craft the inner intensity for which he has been lauded since his death. Keats was convinced that he had made no mark in his lifetime. Knowing he was dying, he wrote to Fanny Brawne in February 1820, "I have left no immortal work behind me - nothing to make my friends proud of my memory - but I have lov'd the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember'd."

Keats's skills were acknowledged in his lifetime by several influential allies such as Shelley and Hunt. His admirers praised him for thinking "on his pulses", for having developed a style which was more heavily loaded with sensualities, more gorgeous in its effects, more voluptuously alive than any poet who had come before him: 'loading every rift with ore'. Shelley had corresponded often with Keats when he was ill in Rome and loudly declared that Keats's death had been brought on by bad reviews in the Quarterly Review. Seven weeks after the funeral he wrote "AdonaÃ¯s", a despairing elegy, stating that Keats's early death was a personal and public tragedy: The loveliest and the last, The bloom, whose petals nipped before they blew Died on the promise of the fruit.

Although Keats wrote that "if poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all", poetry did not come easy to Keats, his work the fruit of a deliberate and prolonged self-education in classical literature. He may have possessed an innate poetic sensibility, but his early works were clearly of a poet learning his craft; his first attempts at verse were often vague, languorously narcotic and lacking a clear eye. His poetic sense was based on the conventional tastes of his friend Charles Cowden Clarke, who first introduced him to the classics, and came also from the predilections of Hunt's Examiner, which Keats had read from a boy. Hunt scorned the Augustan or 'French' school, dominated by Pope, and attacked the earlier Romantic poets Wordsworth and Coleridge, now in their forties, as unsophisticated, obscure and crude writers. Indeed, during Keats's few years as a publishing poet, the reputation of older Romantic school was at its lowest ebb. Keats came to echo these sentiments in his work, identifying himself with a 'new school' for a time, somewhat alienating him from Wordsworth, Coleridge and Byron and providing the basis from the scathing attacks from Blackwoods and The Quarterly.

By the time of his death, Keats had therefore been associated with the taints of both old and new schools: the obscurity of the first wave Romantics and the uneducated affectation of Hunt's "Cockney School". Keats's reputation after death mixed the reviewers' caricature of the simplistic bumbler with the image of the hyper-sensitive genius killed by high feeling, which Shelley later portrayed.

The Victorian sense of poetry as the work of indulgence and luxuriant fancy, offered a schema into which Keats was posthumously fitted. Marked as the standard bearer of sensory writing, his reputation grew steadily and remarkably. This is attributed to several factors. Keats's work had the full support of the influential Cambridge Apostles, (founded 1820). The society included a young Tennyson, later a deeply popular Poet Laureate, who came to regard Keats as the greatest poet of the 19th century. Thirty years after Keats's death, Richard Monckton Milnes wrote the first full biography of the poet (1848) which helped usher Keats into the Canon of English literature. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, including Millais and Rossetti, took Keats as a key muse, painting scenes from his poems including "The Eve of St. Agnes", "Isabella" and "La Belle Dame sans Merci", lush, arresting and popular images which remain closely associated with Keats's work.

In 1882, Swinburne wrote in the Encyclopedia Britannica that "the Ode to a Nightingale, [is] one of the final masterpieces of human work in all time and for all ages". In the twentieth century he remained the muse of poets such as Wilfred Owen, who kept his death date as a day of mourning, Yeats and T. S. Eliot. Vendler stated the odes "are a group of works in which the English language find ultimate embodiment". Bate declared of To Autumn: "Each generation has found it one of the most nearly perfect poems in English" and M. R. Ridley claimed the ode "is the most serenely flawless poem in our language."

The largest collection of the letters, manuscripts, and other papers of Keats is in the Houghton Library at Harvard University. Other collections of material are archived at the British Library, Keats House, Hampstead, the Keats-Shelley Memorial House in Rome and the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. Since 1998 the British Keats-Shelley Memorial Association have annually awarded a poetry prize.

Letters
Keats' letters were first published in 1848 and 1878. During the nineteenth century, critics had deemed them unworthy of attention, even detracting from the body of poetic works. However during the twentieth century they became almost as admired and studied as his poetry, and rank highly in the history of all English literary correspondence. T. S. Eliot described them as "certainly the most notable and most important ever written by any English poet." Keats spent a great swath of his time as a poet considering poetry itself, its constructs and impacts, a deep interest unusual amongst his milieu, who were more easily distracted by metaphysics or politics, fashions or science. As Eliot wrote of Keats's conclusions: "There is hardly one statement of Keats' about poetry which [...] will not be found to be true, and what is more, true for greater and more mature poetry than anything Keats ever wrote." Keats and his friends, poets, critics, novelists, and editors were prolific daily letter writers and Keats' ideas are bound up in the ordinary, his day-to-day missives sharing news, parody and social commentary. Born of an "unself-conscious stream of consciousness," they are impulsive, full of awareness of his own nature and his weak spots. When his brother George went to America, Keats wrote to him in great detail, the body of letters becoming "the real diary" and self-revelation of Keats's life, as well as containing an exposition of his philosophy, and the first drafts of poems containing some of Keats's finest writing and thought. Gittings describes them as akin to a "spiritual journal" not written for a specific other, so much as for synthesis.

Keats also reflects on the background and composition of his poetry, and specific letters often coincide with or anticipate the poems they describe. Writing to his brother George in spring 1819, Keats explored the idea of the world as "the vale of Soul-making", anticipating the great odes that he would write some months later. In the letters, Keats coined ideas such as the Mansion of Many Apartments and the Chameleon Poet, concepts that came to gain common currency and capture the public imagination, despite only making single appearances as phrases in his correspondence. The poetical character, Keats argues "has no self - it is every thing and nothing - It has no character - it enjoys light and shade; [...] What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion [chameleon] Poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation. A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity - he is continually in for - and filling some other Body - The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute - the poet has none; no identity - he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God's Creatures." He outlines Negative capability as the poetic state in which we are "capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason. [...Being] content with half knowledge" where one trusts in the heart's perceptions. He writes later "I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of Imagination - What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth - whether it existed before or not - for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty" again and again turning to the question of what it means to be a poet. "My Imagination is a Monastry and I am its Monk", Keats notes to Shelley. In September 1819, Keats wrote to Reynolds "How beautiful the season is now - How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it ... I never lik'd the stubbled fields as much as now- Aye, better than the chilly green of spring. Somehow the stubble plain looks warm - in the same way as some pictures look warm - this struck me so much in my Sunday's walk that I composed upon it". The final stanza of his last great ode: "To Autumn" runs: Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,- While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue; Long after his death, To Autumn would go on to become one of the most highly regarded poems in the English language.

There are areas of his life and daily routine that Keats does not describe. He mentions little about his childhood, his parents or his financial straits and is seemingly embarrassed to discuss them. In his last year, as his health gave way, his concerns often gave way to despair and morbid obsessions. The publications of letters to Fanny Brawne in 1870 focused on this period and emphasised this tragic aspect, giving rise to widespread criticism at the time.

Biographical controversy
Nobody who had known Keats ever wrote a full biography of Keats's life. Shortly after Keats's death in 1821, his publishers Taylor and Hessey announced they would speedily publish The memoirs and Remains of John Keats but his friends refused to co-operate with the venture and the project was abandoned. There were "biographical jottings of varying natures and values" about the poet who had become a figure within artistic circles - including prolific notes, chapters and letters from his many artist and writer friends. These, however, often give contradictory or heavily biased accounts of events and were subject to quarrels and rifts.

His friends Brown, Severn, Dilke, Shelley and Hunt, his guardian Richard Abbey, his publisher Taylor, Fanny Brawne and many others issued posthumous commentary on Keats's life. These early writings coloured all subsequent biography and have become embedded into a body of Keats legend. Shelley promoted Keats as someone whose achievement could not be separated from agony, who was 'spiritualised' by his decline, and simply too fine-tuned to endure the buffetings of the world. This is the consumptive, suffering image popularly held today. After much dithering, the first official biography was published in 1848 by Richard Monckton Milnes (1809-“1885). Landmark Keats biographers since, include Sidney Colvin (1845-1927), Robert Gittings (1911-1992), Walter Jackson Bate (1918-1999) and Andrew Motion (b. 1952).

Publications

 * The Complete Poetical Works and Letters of John Keats ed. Horace Elisha Scudder, Boston: Riverside Press (1899)
 * The Complete Poetical Works of John Keats ed. H. Buxton Forman. Oxford University Press (1907)
 * The Letters of John Keats 1814-1821 Volumes 1 and 2 ed. Hyder Edward Rollins. Harvard University Press (1958)
 * The Poems of John Keats ed. Jack Stillinger Harvard University Press (1978)
 * Complete Poems ed. Jack Stillinger. Harvard University Press (1982)
 * John Keats: Poetry Manuscripts at Harvard, a Facsimile Edition. ed. Jack Stillinger. Harvard University Press (1990) ISBN 0674477758
 * Selected Letters of John Keats ed. Grant F. Scott. Harvard University Press (2002)
 * John Keats. Ed. Susan Wolfson. Longman (2007)