John Keats was born in London on 31
October 1795, the eldest of Thomas and Frances Jennings Keats’s four children.
Although he died at the age of twenty-five, Keats had perhaps the most
remarkable career of any English poet. He published only fifty-four poems, in
three slim volumes and a few magazines. But over his short development he took
on the challenges of a wide range of poetic forms from the sonnet, to the
Spenserian romance, to the Miltonic epic, defining anew their possibilities
with his own distinctive fusion of earnest energy, control of conflicting
perspectives and forces, poetic self-consciousness, and, occasionally, dry
ironic wit.
Although he is now seen as part of
the British Romantic literary tradition, in his own lifetime Keats would not
have been associated with other major Romantic poets, and he himself was often
uneasy among them. Outside his friend Leigh Hunt‘s circle of liberal intellectuals, the
generally conservative reviewers of the day attacked his work as mawkish and
bad-mannered, as the work of an upstart “vulgar Cockney poetaster” (John Gibson
Lockhart), and as consisting of “the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth
language” (John Wilson Croker). Although Keats had a liberal education in the
boy’s academy at Enfield and trained at Guy’s Hospital to become a surgeon, he
had no formal literary education. Yet Keats today is seen as one of the
canniest readers, interpreters, questioners, of the “modern” poetic
project-which he saw as beginning with William Wordsworth—to create poetry in a world devoid
of mythic grandeur, poetry that sought its wonder in the desires and sufferings
of the human heart. Beyond his precise sense of the difficulties presented him
in his own literary-historical moment, he developed with unparalleled rapidity,
in a relative handful of extraordinary poems, a rich, powerful, and exactly
controlled poetic style that ranks Keats, with the William Shakespeare of the sonnets, as one of the
greatest lyric poets in English.
Keats was said to have been born in
his maternal grandfather’s stable, the Swan and Hoop, near what is now Finsbury
Circus, but there is no real evidence for this birthplace, or for the belief
that his family was particularly poor. Thomas Keats managed the stable for his
father-in-law and later owned it, providing the family an income comfortable
enough for them to buy a home and send the older children, John and George
(1797-1841), to the small village academy of Enfield, run by the liberal and
gifted teacher John Clarke. Young Tom Keats (1799-1818) soon followed them.
Although little is known of Keats’s early home life, it appears to have been
happy, the family close-knit, the environment full of the exuberance and clamor
of a big-city stable and inn yard. Frances Keats was devoted to her children,
particularly her favorite, John, who returned that devotion intensely.
