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3. John Keats（1795-1821）
John Keats was born on 31 October 1795, first child of Thomas Keats and
Frances Jennings Keats, who had apparently eloped. In 1804, when Keats was
only eight years old, his father, a manager of a livery stables, was killed
in a fall from a horse. Just over two months later, for mysterious reasons,
his mother, Frances, remarried, to a London bank clerk named William
Rawlings. Frances quickly decided she had made some sort of terrible error
and left, taking nothing with her since the laws of the time decreed that
all her property and even her children belonged to her husband. Frances’
mother, Alice, swept in and took custody of the children. It was around this
time that small Keats became prone to fistfights, which he rarely lost even
though he was small for his age.
Frances reappeared suddenly in 1809, ill and depressed
from many years of depending on the kindness of strangers. Keats was
overjoyed to see her and took care of her devotedly, but it was soon obvious
that she had consumption. She died in 1810, a year or so after her brother
died of the same disease. John was crushed, and turned from fighting to
studying. A year later, one of his financial guardians, a man named Abbey,
sat him down and asked John what he would like to do for a living. John had
already considered the question, and replied that he would like to be a
surgeon. So he was duly apprenticed to a surgeon named Hammond who lived in
the neighborhood.
It was in 1813 that John first started reading
lyric poetry, such as the most notably works like The Faerie Queen
written by
Sir Edmund Spenser. It was also around this time that John began
to really rebel against Hammond. The following year, Grandmother Jennings
died, and the family was split up. Since it was improper at that time for
younger sisters to live with older brothers without a parental type around,
Frances, his youngest sister was sent to live with the kids’ other financial
guardian and the two boys went to work. John just kept to himself and wrote
really sad poems. Since these poems still were not very good, he kept right
on with learning to be a surgeon. But over the next couple of years, poetry
gradually became the overriding ambition of his life and medicine was left
in the dust.
One of Keats’ sonnets, called To Solitude, was printed in 1816, in The
Examiner. This sonnet was good, but it was not until a little later in the
year that he wrote On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer, which proved that
he was the man to watch. His first volume of poetry appeared on 3 March
1817, and it did not sell well at all. Young Keats was depressed, but kept
writing. Shelley had challenged him to a contest of epic poetry writing over
the summer; and for that contest, John wrote Endymion, which made him the
sought-after young poet in London and lived in a whirl of parties and
dances, even though he dislike crowds.
In June of 1818, Keats apparently became convinced that he would have only
three more years to live. He had already written many of his most famous
poems, but he was still convinced that he had not yet done enough to leave
his mark on the literary world. His brother George had announced plans to
migrate to Illinois with his new wife. And his brother Tom had just started
showing signs of consumption and needed John to look after him. And to top
it all off, John Keats had just fallen madly in love with a young woman
named Frances Brawne. All of this overwhelmed and depressed him. He tried to
lose himself in his latest poem, Hyperion. Besides, he wrote numerous lyrics
and odes during this time: the Eve of St. Mark, Ode to Psyche, Ode to a
Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode on Melancholy, Ode on Indolence; and
finished the Eve of St. Agnes, Lamia PartⅠandⅡ, Otho the Great, To Autumn.
Tom died in December of 1818. Though Keats should have received £500 from
Tom’s estate, Abbey, the guardian, decreed that he could not have it until
his sister Frances turned. It was not until more a year after Keats’ death
that anyone realized that Abbey had misappropriated nearly £1000 from Alice
Jennings’ estate. To make matters worse, brother George had gone broke and
was begging John to send him whatever he could scavenge from the family
funds. Desperately, John convinced his publishers to issue another volume of
his poetry, but this was not a stunning success. Dead broke, he still
allowed George to have the remnants of the family estate. Keats was rapidly
becoming independent on the help of his friends, such as Leigh Hunt and
Charles Brown. Keats was also developing consumption, coughing up blood in
February of 1820. During this period, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes,
and some other poems were published.
It was around this time that, without consulting Keats, Brown began
arrangements for sending him to Italy. Keats did not want to be so far away
from his ladylove but failed in argue. He left in September of1820,
accompanied by Joseph Severn, an up and coming portrait artist. Once in
Rome, the two men moved into lodgings across the piazza from an English
doctor named Clark. Keats was not allowed to write poetry and only given the
dullest books to read, as emotional excitement was considered very bad for
consumptive patients. In December, he tried to commit suicide by taking
laudanum but was stopped. Later, delirious from the disease and the
starvation diet Clark prescribed, John would rant at Severn for stopping him
and even went so far as to accuse his friends of having poisoned him back in
London. Therefore, during this time, his more creative work compared to the
previous period was over.
On 23 February 1821, Keats died. He had requested that his tombstone read
only “here lies one whose name was written in water”. Charles Brown, feeling
that was too brusque, had this carved on the stone instead: “This Grave
contains all that was Mortal of a Young English Poet Who on his Death Bed,
in the Malicious Power of his Enemies, Desired these Words to be engraved on
his Tomb Stone ‘Here lies One Whose Name was written in Water’”.
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