John Keats

Famous works

• Ode to a Nightingale
• Ode on a Grecian Urn
• To Autumn
• Bright Star
• La Belle Dame sans Merci

An unlikely beginning

Keats was born in London to a stable-keeper and lost both parents young. Apprenticed to a surgeon, he earned his medical license in 1816 — and abandoned medicine for poetry, a decision his guardians considered madness. He published his first volume in 1817 to mostly indifferent reviews.

The 1818 volume 'Endymion' was savaged by critics, one of whom suggested the young 'Cockney poet' go back to his pills. Keats pressed on anyway, writing to his brothers about 'negative capability' — the capacity to rest in uncertainty — that has become one of the most famous ideas about artistic creation ever set down in a letter.

The miraculous year of 1819

In a single extraordinary year, Keats wrote nearly everything he is remembered for: the six great odes ('Ode to a Nightingale,' 'Ode on a Grecian Urn,' 'Ode on Melancholy,' 'Ode on Indolence,' 'Ode to Psyche,' and 'To Autumn'), 'La Belle Dame sans Merci,' 'The Eve of St. Agnes,' and the 'Bright Star' sonnet.

During the same period he fell in love with Fanny Brawne, to whom he was engaged, while the tuberculosis that had killed his mother and brother was beginning its work in him.

Death in Rome and afterlife

Sent to Italy for his health in 1820, Keats died in Rome in February 1821, aged twenty-five, believing he had failed. His gravestone bears no name, only the epitaph he chose: 'Here lies One whose Name was writ in Water.'

Within a generation his reputation had reversed completely. Shelley mourned him in 'Adonais,' the Victorians canonized him, and today 'To Autumn' and 'Ode to a Nightingale' routinely top polls of the greatest poems in English.

Style

Keats's style is sensuous and densely textured — rich in imagery of taste, touch, and scent — held within rigorous forms like the ode and the sonnet. His lines move between delight and an acute awareness of transience.

Legacy

Keats proved that a poet could achieve immortality in a career of barely five years. His odes are considered the summit of the form in English, and his letters are read as literature in their own right. He remains the most beloved of the Romantic poets.

FAQ

How did John Keats die?

He died of tuberculosis in Rome on February 23, 1821, aged 25, having traveled to Italy in a last attempt to recover his health.

What are Keats's most famous poems?

The odes of 1819 — especially 'Ode to a Nightingale,' 'Ode on a Grecian Urn,' and 'To Autumn' — plus the sonnet 'Bright Star.'

What does 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' mean?

It is the closing statement of 'Ode on a Grecian Urn': the urn suggests that in art, beauty and truth are identical — an idea critics have debated for two centuries.

What is negative capability?

Keats's term, from an 1817 letter, for the ability to remain 'in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason' — which he saw as essential to great art.