Biographical Sketch: John Keats (1795-1821)

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John Keats was born in London, the son of a livery stableman and his wife. At the age of fifteen he was apprenticed to an apothecary-surgeon, and on completion of his apprenticeship did further training at Guy’s Hospital, London. Having qualified, Keats abandoned medicine for poetry. In 1818 he fell in love with Fanny Brawne, but was prevented from marrying her by financial difficulties. In 1819, his annus mirabilis, he produced all of his great odes, a number of fine sonnets, and several other masterpieces. The following year, he developed tuberculosis, the disease that had killed his mother and beloved younger brother, Tom. Hoping to prolong his life, he traveled to Italy, but died in Rome the following spring. At the time of his death he had published only fifty-four poems, and his reputation as a great poet was by no means secure. In his poetry he struggled to make sense of a world riddled with “misery, heartache and pain, sickness and oppression.” Rather than take solace in religious or philosophical creeds, as did Wordsworth and Coleridge, he strove to develop “negative capacity,” the ability to exist in a condition of “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any reaching after fact and reason.” He looked to sensation, passion, and imagination to guide him: “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affection and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth,” he wrote to a friend. Despite the brevity of his life and writing career, Keats mastered a number of difficult forms, producing complex variations of the ode and the Petrachan and Shakespearian sonnets.