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More than 5000 entries on the history, culture and life of Britain (published in 1993 by Macmillan, now out of print)
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John Keats
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(1795–1821)
A major poet of the *Romantic movement, whose creative profusion was cut short by his death at the age of 26. Living an uneventful existence in London, his imagination was released by accidents of art and nature. A good example is his earliest well-known poem, written when he was 20. A friend and he had spent an excited evening reading the translation of Homer by George Chapman (c.1560–1634). Early the next morning the friend received the sonnet On first looking into Chapman's Homer, beginning 'Much have I travelled in the realms of gold' and ending with a sense of kinship with early explorers, staring in wonder at the Pacific, 'silent upon a peak in Darien'.
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Keats' extraordinary year of creativity was 1819, when the circumstances of his life gave an intensity tinged with melancholy to his work. His brother Tom had died the previous year of tuberculosis; Keats himself was passionately in love with Fanny Brawne, his next-door neighbour, to whom he became engaged; and his own recurrent bouts of illness were coming to seem increasingly like tuberculosis. It was in such a mood that he contrasted the eternal qualities of nature (*Ode to a Nightingale) and of art (*Ode on a Grecian Urn) with the transience of human happiness.
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He found an escape too in fantasies of medievalism (The *Eve of St Agnes, La *Belle Dame sans Merci) which were to have great influence on poets and painters later in the century. All these poems were published together in 1820, just seven months before his death.
He was sent to Italy for his health. Early in 1821 he died in Rome, in lodgings at the foot of the Spanish Steps (a floor of the building is now owned by the *Landmark Trust). The pair of semi-detached houses in Hampstead, the homes in 1819 of the poet and of Fanny Brawne, are kept as a museum.
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