John Keats was London-born in 1795, at the end of October, either the 29th or 31rst, to a livery-stable keeper and his wife. When he was but 8 years old, his father was killed falling from a horse. When he was 14 his mother passed on from tuberculosis. John attended the Clark school in Enfield until that time, after which, he became an apprentice to an apothecary-surgeon in 1811. The schoolmaster, Charles Cowden Clarke, befriended him and introduced him to the joys of poetry. By 1813, John was writing his own. Yet, in 1815 he became a medical student in two London hospitals, and by the end of the next year he had completed his studies satisfactorily. Yet, the world of medicine, while it appealed to him, did not call to his deepest urges as poetry did. Not surprisingly, after his formal studies, he turned to poetry full time. "Poems", his first volume, was in print in March of the next year, 1817, and for the following 13-14 months he laboured on his first great epic poem: Endymion. Unfortunately, by the time he was 23 years old, his tuberculosis began weakening his body. Of course, this year laid a blessing on his heart as well; he met and fell in love with Fanny Brawne. She became the love of his life, and by April of 1819, they were engaged. Only, it wasn't to last. By the end of the summer, their courtship was suffering from his throes of illness and his financial problems, and within 10 months of their engagement their relationship was broken, and John was dying. In March of 1820 he was ordered to stop all work by his doctor. After publishing his last volume of works that summer, he decided that maybe a trip southward would benefit his health, so, he headed for Rome with a friend named Severn. It was not to be. His illness overtook him while he was there and he died on February 23rd, 1821. He is buried at the Protestant Cemetery in Rome.

Some have considered Keat's work to fall into the Romantic realm of thought. I disagree. While his work certainly does reflect a sensibility and an exaltation of the foreign and natural, Keats was a young poet who sought after an expression of full experience, not hailing one experience above another. It is his intensity and complexity that separates him from other poets of the same era. Out of his desire to capture the full experience of a theme arose Keats' permanent belief that "Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty." And of course, by beauty he did not mean prettiness or sentimentality, but the entirety of a subject, and a keen observation of all its elements, thus converting into the 'Truth' of that subject. Therefore, with his attempt to fuse together the aspiratoins of the mind and the heart and the gut, he did more than just separate himself from the Romantic movement, he became a unique voice, which at that time did not earn him as wide an audience as he could have had had he been a decade older, or been born a hundred years later. That is not to say that his poetry suffered because of that, because, it can be discovered that Keats was as steady as a rock in his convictions and his poetic decisions, and that he delved for a deeper truth.

Among his best work is Ode On A Grecian Urn, Ode To A Nightingale, Hyperion, and Endymion. Perhaps his most quoted and famous lines are from the opening of Endymion:

"A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness..."


My personal favourite is Ode On A Grecian Urn.