John Keats [1795-1821] ENG Ranked #7 in the top 380 poets Votes 82%: 6195 up, 1353 down
Sensual imagery, most notably in the series of odes. This is typical of romantic poets, as they aimed to accentuate extreme emotion through the emphasis of natural imagery.
John Keats , was one of the greatest English poets and a major figure in the Romantic movement. Although he had a very brief life he wrote much and influenced many. Some of his poems regularly feature in modern anthologies even after 2 centuries.Keats was born in 1795 in Moorfields, London. His father died when he was eight and his mother when he was fourteen; these sad circumstances drew him particularly close to his two brothers, George and Tom, and his sister Fanny.
Keats was well educated at a school in Enfield, where he began a translation of Virgil`s Aeneid. In 1810 he was apprenticed to an apothecary-surgeon. His first attempts at writing poetry date from about 1814, and include an `Imitation` of the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser. In 1815 he left his apprenticeship and became a student at Guy`s Hospital, London; one year later, he abandoned the profession of medicine for poetry.
Keats`s first volume of poems was published in 1817. It attracted some good reviews, but these were followed by the first of several harsh attacks by the influential Blackwood`s Magazine. Undeterred, he pressed on with his poem `Endymion`, which was published in the spring of the following year.
Keats toured the north of England and Scotland in the summer of 1818, returning home to nurse his brother Tom, who was ill with tuberculosis. After Tom`s death in December he moved into a friend`s house in Hampstead, now known as, Keats House. There he met and fell deeply in love with a young neighbour, Fanny Brawne.
During the following year, despite ill health and financial problems, he wrote an astonishing amount of poetry, including `The Eve of St Agnes`, `La Belle Dame sans Merci`, `Ode to a Nightingale` and `To Autumn`. His second volume of poems appeared in July 1820. Soon afterwards, by now very ill with tuberculosis, he set off with a friend to Italy, where he died the following February.
Aestheticism, Agnosticism, Bipolar disorder, Epic, Gothic, Romanticism, Sonnet | |