John Keats (1795-1821) British, Compiled Poetical Works. First printed in 1901, reprinted in 1910. 

Size: 4 x 6 1/8 x 5/8 in. 

#3103 #12 . 

John Keats was born in Moorgate, London on October 31st, 1795. His parents were poor, and in 1803 John was sent to board at John Clarke’s school in Enfield, which was much smaller and had a liberal outlook and progressive curriculum more modern than the larger, more prestigious schools like Eton. Keats developed an interest in ancient classics and history, but in 1804 his father died from a skull fracture after falling from his horse, and in 1810 his mother died of tuberculosis. This led the 14 year old Keats to quit school and become an apprentice to Thomas Hammond, a surgeon and apothecary. In October 1815 Keats registered as a medical student at Guy’s Hospital (now part of King’s College). Keats’ long and expensive medical training with Hammond and at Guy’s Hospital led his family to assume he would pursue a lifelong career in medicine, but due to encouragement from fellow poets such as Leigh Hunt and Lord Byron he began to suffer extended periods of depression. Despite receiving his apothecary’s license in 1816, he devoted himself fully to studying literature, particularly experimenting with sonnets. A series of early pieces were met with either critical ambivalence or commercial failure, but he was encouraged further by the lawyer Richard Woodhouse, who preserved much of his early work. Keats rubbed elbows with Charles Lamb, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Hazlitt, part of a group that would come to be dubbed the “New School of Poetry.” In addition to giving up a profitable career as a surgeon and squandering his inheritance rapidly, Keats often loaned money freely to his friends, therefore unable to cover his own debts. In 1817 he moved with his brothers to the village of Hampstead, where they could tend to each other’s various ailments while he still remained close to the circle of Romantic poets. Both of his brothers eventually died of tuberculosis, penniless and wracked with debt, and Keats likely caught it from one of them that year. In June of 1818 Keats began a walking tour of Scotland with Charles Armitage Brown. Inspired by a series of recent lectures by Hazlitt on English poetic identity, as well as meeting William Wordsworth, he spent a year in what is considered his most prolific period, putting out odes and poetic experimentations. They were all either ignored or condemned by critics, with John Gibson Lockhart writing in Blackwood’s Magazine a scathing review that coined the defamatory term “the Cockney School” for Hunt, Hazlitt, and Keats. This dismissal was as much political as literary, an insult to writers not from expensive schools like Eton and Oxford who used non-formal rhyming and “low diction.” A handful of poems, a play, and a desperate stab at journalism to make ends meet were also met with critical damnation, and one of the only forms of solace for Keats in the late 1810s was a passionate affair with a writer Isabella Jones, who he had befriended in 1817, and a longer poetic (unconsummated) relationship with Frances Brawne in 1818, who became his muse. In 1820 tuberculosis began to take hold and he moved to Rome, as many did, to seek warmer climates. He hemorrhaged frequently, suffered disastrously on the voyage, and was subject to nonsensical medical care, sometimes forced to eat nothing but an anchovy a day while being bled to help “starve the consumption out.” Keats died in Rome, in a house near the Spanish Steps now turned into a museum in his honor, on February 23rd, 1821, at the age of 25. Though his writing period had only really been about six years, his works today are recognized as remarkably mature and pivotal in the shift to modern considerations of poetry. He is now one of the most studied and admired British poets in history, thanks in part to the work that Shelley, Hunt, and Brawne did after his death to promote his style and tragic story.