He started at the pacific. All his men/looked at each other with a wild
surmise--/silent, upon a peak in Darien”; “Beauty is truth, truth Beauty,
--that is all/ ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”; The author of these
and many other lines fixed permanently in the shared consciousness of those who
speak English, John Keats was an extremely unlikely candidate for poetic
immortality. Born into a working-class family two centuries ago. Orphaned in
childhood, his work was subjected to vicious attacks by established literary
critics, dead in his mid-twenties from tuberculosis, he overcame all obstacles,
not only to write some of the finest poems in the language, but also to form, in
the minds of millions of people. John Keats was born in London on October 31,
1795. The first child of Thomas Keats he was a livery-stable keeper. And his
wife Frances (Jennings) Keats was a housewife. Three more sons were born one of
whom died in infancy. A daughter was born to the couple before Thomas’s death
in April 1804 from a horse accident. With four very young children to care for.
Frances married a man named William Rawlings in 1805. The marriage was not
successful and when the couple separated in the following year she and her four
children went to live with her mother. John Keats received his earliest
education at a private school in Enfield run buy the Reverend John Clarke. Among
his classmates was the headmaster’s son, Charles Cowden clarke. Who would be
his lifelong friend. Keats’s mother died of tuberculosis in February 1810, and
in 1811 he was taken out of school and apprenticed to Thomas Hammond, a surgeon
at Edmonton hospital. It was during this time that he began to read poetry
seriously and to write it himself. His apprenticeship ended by mutual consent in
1815, and Keats went to London to study medicine at the joint school of St.
Thomas’s and Guy’s Hospitals. In July 1816, he passed his examination as an
apothecary, and worked until April of the next year as a medical practitioner.
Keats’s first volume entitled simply Poems was published in March 1817 and
failed to attract much notice beyond a favorable review from Leigh Hunt. During
that time Keats met Fanny Brawne, a young woman who throughout what appears to
have been for him at least. Rather tormented relationship was to be the great
love of his brief life and to whom he became engaged some time around the end of
the year. By December 1818 when his brother Tom died of tuberculosis. On
February 3, 1820 Keats had a coughing fit that led him to hemorrhage some dark
arterial blood. With his medical training he recognized the gravity of the
situation and he told his friend Charles Armitage Brown, “That drop of blood
is my death-warrant; I must die.” After another relapse in June 1820 Keats
determined to go to Italy, from whose warmer and drier climate he hoped to find
some relief of his suffering. On September 18, he sailed for Naples with a close
friend the artist Joseph Severn. Keats never saw England or fanny again. The two
men took lodgings in Rome, where severn loyally cared for Keats, who retained
his gentle and uncomplaining nature until his death on February 23, 1821. He was
not quite four months past his twenty-fifth birthday. In addition to his poetry
Keats is the author of some of the most interesting letters by any literary
figure. In their aesthetic theorizing, their insights into nature of the
creative process and their constant display of a lovable and admirable
personality, his letters not only complement his poetry but shows an
intellectual grasp and penetration that is not always evident in the poems
themselves. The life of Keats to some degree mythology by biographers and other
enthusiasts has done as much as anything to fashion the popular image of the
poet as a doomed and tortured soul. Scorned by an uncaring and pouring out his
heart in spasms of unrequited love. And his work has likewise done much to shape
the common view of poetry as sensuous images expressed in rhapsodic language
that, to quote his own lines on the nightingale’s song,”oft-times hath/
charmed magic casements, opening on the foam/ Of perilous seas, in faery lands
forlorn.” The best of his poems, of course, transcend such stereotypes.
Gorgeous as their music may be, they do not traffic in pretty escapist
fantasies, but instead confront some of life’s most complex problems and
situations, with a constant awareness of irreducible sadness that lies at the
heart of human experience. My opinion I learned more of john Keats that I ever
knew about him. I learned what he went threw just to become a poet and what
hardships he went threw just to get there. And all of the sacrifices he made
just to become known as one of the best British writers that anyone has ever
lived so I end by saying that john keats in my opinion is one of the best
poet’s that I have read so far. And I give him credit for all of the hard work
and inspiration that he has put into peoples lives all over the world and if
they have not read a peace of work by john then you should go out and read some.