On First Looking into Chapman's Homer (1816)
Sonnet on discovering Homer in translation, with 'stout Cortez' staring at the Pacific
Literature · Poets
John Keats
1795–1821 · English
Romanticism
John Keats was a second-generation Romantic poet who trained as a surgeon-apothecary before giving his life to poetry. In a brief career of about six years he wrote Endymion, The Eve of St Agnes, La Belle Dame sans Merci and the great odes of 1819, including Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn and To Autumn. Mocked by reviewers in his lifetime, he died of tuberculosis in Rome aged 25 and is now among the most loved poets in English.
How to spot them
- ▸The 1819 odes: Nightingale, Grecian Urn, Autumn, Melancholy, Psyche
- ▸'A thing of beauty is a joy for ever' (Endymion); 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'
- ▸'Negative capability'; trained at Guy's Hospital
- ▸Fanny Brawne; Keats House (Wentworth Place), Hampstead; died in Rome by the Spanish Steps
- ▸Epitaph: 'Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water'
Key works
Endymion (1818)
Long mythological romance beginning 'A thing of beauty is a joy for ever'
The Eve of St Agnes (1820 (written 1819))
Spenserian-stanza romance in which Porphyro elopes with Madeline
La Belle Dame sans Merci (1820 (written 1819))
Ballad of a knight-at-arms enthralled by a fairy woman, 'alone and palely loitering'
Ode to a Nightingale (1819)
Ode on the bird's immortal song, written at Wentworth Place, Hampstead
Ode on a Grecian Urn (1819)
Ode ending 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'
To Autumn (1819)
Ode beginning 'Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness', written after a walk at Winchester
Lamia (1820)
Narrative poem about a serpent-woman who marries a young Corinthian
Key ideas
- Negative capability: being 'capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts' without reaching after fact and reason
- Beauty and truth as one; the imagination seizing beauty must be truth
- Life as a 'vale of Soul-making' (letter of 1819)
- His letters are prized as some of the finest writing on poetry in English
Quick-fire facts
- •Born in Moorgate, London, where his father kept the Swan and Hoop livery stables
- •Trained at Guy's Hospital and qualified as an apothecary in 1816 before abandoning medicine
- •In the Chapman's Homer sonnet he wrongly credits Cortez rather than Balboa with first seeing the Pacific
- •Attacked by Blackwood's Magazine as one of the 'Cockney School' of poetry
- •Engaged to Fanny Brawne, his neighbour at Wentworth Place, Hampstead
- •Died of tuberculosis in Rome on 23 February 1821, nursed by the painter Joseph Severn
- •The house where he died, beside the Spanish Steps, is now the Keats-Shelley House museum
- •Buried in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome, under the epitaph 'Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water'
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Sources
- Poetry Foundation — John Keats
- Andrew Motion — John Keats