John Keats – one of the major poets of the English romantic movement.
He is famous by his songs, romances, epistolary poems, epics, hymns, ballads, odes, sonnets.
John Keats was born in Moorgate, near London, 31 of October 1795.
John was the oldest of Thomas and Frances Keats’ (born Jennings) four children: George, Thomas and Frances Mary (Fanny). His father first worked as a hostler and then was a stable keeper.
In the summer of 1803, Keats was sent to board at John Clarke’s school in Enfield Town – the small school, where Keats discovered an interest in classic literature and history. John Keats had lost both of his parents at an early age – his father died in April 1804 when John was eight, his mother died of tuberculosis in March 1810 when John was 14. Children were in the care of their grandmother, Alice Jennings, at the Edmonton. In 1811, when he was sixteen, he was apprenticed to a surgeon and apothecary Dr. Hammond, in Edmonton, near Enfield. In October 1815, Keats entered Guy’s Hospital for further training, but soon he gave up his medical work to be a poet, not a surgeon. First appearance in print of Keats’s poetry was in May 1816 – his sonnet “O Solitude”, published in his magazine “The Examiner”.
His productive years between 1818 and 1820 yielded some of his masterworks, including “Lamia,” “The Eve of St. Agnes“, “Ode on a Grecian Urn“. In 1819, with his friend Charles Brown, Keats moved in the Hampstead, neighborhood of London. There, he met Fanny Brawne and by the end of the year, they were engaged.
In February 1820, Keats had a hemorrhage in his lungs – the first symptom of the tuberculosis.
Soon, after his last volume of poetry was published in July 1820, Keats travelled to Italy with his close friend, painter Joseph Severn.
John Keats dies of tuberculosis at the age of 25 in Rome on 23 February 1821.
He was buried in the Protestant cemetery.