JOHN KEATS
(1795–1821)
The son of an hostler in a livery-stable, with only a partial education, John Keats certainly would not be chosen as a possible equal of Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth, or Coleridge. Yet such was his genius that he attained this position with no other training than came from his love of reading, especially in the fields of mythology and poetry.
After a few years at school he was apprenticed to a surgeon, and studied at the hospitals for a time, but disliking the profession he gave himself up to reading and then to authorship. Shakespeare, Wordsworth, the Italian poets, and later, Milton, were among his favorites. He was well built and strong, yet exposure brought on consumption in 1818, shortly after the publication of "Endymion." Whether the decline in his health was due to the violent attacks upon his poem by the reviewers or to the fact that he nursed a consumptive brother for the three months preceding the latter's death is still considered an open question by many. Shelley and Byron were bitter against the reviews and attributed his steady decline to that source alone. Meanwhile he worked on his last and greatest poems, while his health went to pieces. When it was too late for hope he sailed to Italy with his friend Severn, in whose arms he died a few months later. Not quite two years afterward Shelley's remains were laid beside him in the Protestant Cemetery at Rome, and in 1881 Severn, too, found his last resting-place there.
The epitaph which Keats had inscribed on his tomb,
"Here lies one whose name was writ in water,"
is happily proved false. Even to-day it is probable that he has not reached the highest recognition which he is to win in the world of poetry.
The one idea at the foundation of all his writings is the much-quoted phrase which begins "Endymion,"—"A thing of beauty is a joy forever," or as he expressed it in the "Ode on a Grecian Urn,"—"Beauty is truth." He is the poet of the senses, luxuriant, yet sublime. The Odes, "The Eve of St. Agnes," and "Hyperion" are hardly to be matched in the whole realm of English poetry. Strange to say Keats never studied Greek, leaving school before he reached that subject. Yet his work is nearer that of the Greeks in its exquisite balance of reason and feeling, in its absolute appreciation of beauty, and in purity of tone and style, nearer than that of all other English writers. But this is only true of his best work; in his other verse he lacks in taste and proportion, lavishing description without measure on every object of any charm.