The strangely encouraging life of John Keats

John Keats was born in London in 1795 the son of Thomas and Francis Keats his father was in charge of an inn and it's busy stables and the prospects for the family looked good when Keats was only nine years old however his father was thrown from his horse and was discovered in the street bleeding heavily he died without regaining consciousness his death was followed by that of the father-in-law who had provided the family with financial security in the meantime two months after the death of her husband Francis Keats had remarried the overall effect of this combination of events was to undermine the financial and emotional security of the family three boys and one girl the disruption was completed when they were separated from their mother going to live with their grandmother in Edmonton this was not far from the school in Enfield where Keats and his brother George had been placed unlike many contemporary schools that was run on liberal and humanitarian principles at school keeps displayed a warm and generous personality though he had a combative side perhaps a response to the troubles of his childhood there was further emotional disturbance for him when his mother who second marriage had broken down reappeared but now with her health broken the shock displayed itself in his behavior in school in a fit of rage he struck one of the Masters in any other school at the time this would surely have provoked savage punishment but he was treated gently and sympathetically by the headmaster the following term which began in January 1809 he redirected his energies into an all-important task as his friend Charles Cowden Clark the headmaster son remember he determined to carry off all the first prizes in literature by the end of the year keeps had achieved his objective but he returned to his grandmother's house that Christmas to find his mother gravely ill she died in marks of the following year of tuberculosis and after her death Keith was removed from the school by his newly appointed guardian and apprenticed to a local surgeon however encouraged by Charles Karen Clark he kept up his literary interests he finished a translation of Virgil's Aeneid and began making his first steps into poetry but he kept up his medical career entering Guy's Hospital in 1815 as a medical student attending lectures performing minor operations and later on assisting the chief surgeon in the days before anesthetics and with medical knowledge often sadly deficient these operations were often horrific he received his apothecary certificate one under half thousand pounds of the legacy left to him by his grandmother had been invested in his career and all expected that he would go on to become a well-paid member of the Royal College of Surgeons but one of his poems had already appeared in print and during October 1816 a series of events turned him decisively towards literature the first of which was his brighting of the poem of undoubted genius he sonnet on Chapman's Homer which began much have I traveled in the realms of gold literature and poetry had taken over his imagination and soon would take over his entire life at this point John Keats had less than five years to live all his great work would come to fruition at an astonishing pace it has been well said that his reputation actually rests on about 30 poems but all his other poetic industry though it produced works that are generally unread and have little critical status today would contribute immensely to his achievement in all he would publish three volumes of poems the first of which appeared in 1817 it was dedicated to Lee hunt the courageous editor of The Examiner the liberal newspaper which stood against the tide of reaction that had swept the country in the aftermath of the French Revolution Keats both gained and lost through his association with hunt though his horizons were broadened by Hunt's connections including Shelley his work was henceforth doomed to receive a party's and reception for in the aftermath of the French Revolution a number of journals have been set up to resist all liberal ideas which was seen in the heightened political atmosphere as highly dangerous Keats was also seen as a straightforward acolyte of hunt somewhat contrived poetic style which did him a great disservice his first book however it was reasonably received by his friends at least when his second volume Endymion a poetic reworking of a Greek myth was published in 1818 many reviews were harsh not only was keeps in the firing line due to his friendship with hunt but his departure from the formality of eighteenth-century poetic forms grated on contemporary ideas of good taste yet even his harshest critic had to admit that Endymion contained so-called gleams of genius and the work was an important stage in his poetic journey he wrote later in Endymion I left headlong into the sea and therefore have become better acquainted with the soundings the quicksands and the rocks than if I had stayed upon the green Shore and piped a silly pipe and took tea and comfortable advice when his third book appeared in 1820 many of the critics were silenced it contained his greatest work Lamia - autumn Isabella in the pot of basil the eve of Sontag niece Hyperion and his ratos they were all testimony to his hard-won poetic development and the book wrote a friend looks like an angel and talks like one too but Keats was beyond taking pleasure in his success Bertie of that year he had stumbled into his home as if drunk and after being put to bed he had coughed softly into a handkerchief there is blood from my mouth he said bring the candle let me see this blood looking up he said calmly I know the color of that blood it is arterial blood I cannot be deceived in that color that drop of blood is my death warrant I must die from then on his life began to unravel a terrible bitterness that he could never marry his sweetheart Fanny Braun that he was being patronized by his friends that poetic success had eluded him sometimes broke through his painstakingly created self-discipline and so in the end he traveled to Italy in the hope that he would recover in a warmer climate but his illness was too far advanced the tubercular bacillus and unseen presence a spirit of decay to use phrases by Shelley which revealed the limits of the contemporary understanding of disease before the germ theory was inexorably gnawing at his lungs in his small rented room by the Spanish Steps in Rome he gradually slipped away his last words were spoken to Joseph seven his artist friend who in his last days had tried unsuccessfully to bring him into the Christian fold don't breathe on me said the dying poet he comes like ice John Keats left behind him some of the richest poems in the English language and a collection of letters that sparkle with insights into poetry and the poetic vocation he was he wrote straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness with a hope that there was something in human nature tending to purify he wrote with the quality he called negative capability the ability to enter into other fields of being if a sparrow come before my window he wrote I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel three days after his death at the age of 25 he was buried in the Protestant cemetery in Rome he had requested that his tombstone should simply read here lies one whose name was writ in water you

Channel: John Webster

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Keywords: John Keats, 19th century medicine, tuberculosis, Poetry, Romanticism, John Keats life, John Keats biography, Romantic poetry, Spanish Steps, Endymion, Hyperion, To Autumn, John Keats doctor, John Keats and Leigh Hunt, John Keats and critics, consumption, John Keats grave, Protestant cemetery Rome, Taylor Swift and Romantic poetry

Id: Mxc63WPaksY

Length: 9min 50sec (590 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 16 2016