John Keats

John Keats (1795–1821) was born on 31 October 1795 in Moorfields, London, the eldest of four children of Thomas Keats, a livery-stable keeper, and Frances Jennings Keats. His father died in a riding accident in 1804; his mother died of tuberculosis in 1810. The orphaned children were placed under the guardianship of Richard Abbey, a tea merchant of limited sympathy, who apprenticed John to an apothecary-surgeon in 1811.

Life and Career

Keats trained as an apothecary and was licensed to practice in 1816, but he had already decided to devote himself to poetry. He was introduced to the literary circle around Leigh Hunt, whose Examiner published his first poem (“O Solitude”) in May 1816, and became part of a brilliant London circle that included Shelley, Hazlitt, Lamb, and the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon.

Poems (1817), his first collection, attracted some attention but also savage reviews from the Tory press — Blackwood’s Magazine and the Quarterly Review attacked him as a “Cockney poet,” sneering at his lower-middle-class origins. The experience was wounding but did not slow him. Endymion (1818), a long mythological romance, was uneven but showed ambition; the Quarterly’s brutal review became famous — Byron quipped that Keats had been “snuff’d out by an article,” a myth that persists despite being untrue.

The great year was 1819 — the “annus mirabilis” of English Romantic poetry. Between January and September, Keats wrote “The Eve of St. Agnes,” “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to Melancholy,” “Ode on Indolence,” “To Autumn,” “Lamia,” and substantial parts of the unfinished epic Hyperion and its revision The Fall of Hyperion. No poet has ever produced so much of the highest quality in so short a period.

In early 1820, Keats coughed blood and recognised it as a death warrant — “I know the colour of that blood,” he told his friend Charles Brown; “that drop of blood is my death warrant.” He was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He sailed for Italy in September 1820, accompanied by the painter Joseph Severn, hoping the warmer climate would help. It did not. He died in a room beside the Spanish Steps in Rome on 23 February 1821, aged twenty-five. His last words to Severn were: “Severn — I — lift me up — I am dying — I shall die easy; don’t be frightened — be firm, and thank God it has come.”

Major Works and Themes

Keats’s poetry is the most sensuous in the language — he writes about the physical world with an intensity of perception that makes the reader feel the texture, the temperature, the weight of things. His great subject is the relationship between beauty and mortality: the knowledge that beauty is precious precisely because it passes, and that the desire to arrest and possess it is both the deepest human impulse and the most impossible.

“Ode to a Nightingale” (1819) is the supreme English ode: the poet, half in love with easeful death, listens to a nightingale singing in the darkness and meditates on the difference between the immortality of art (the bird’s song) and the mortality of the listener. “Ode on a Grecian Urn” — “Beauty is truth, truth beauty — that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” — is its companion piece: a meditation on the frozen perfection of art and the cost of that perfection.

“To Autumn” (1819) is Keats’s most perfect poem and one of the greatest in the language: three stanzas that describe the English autumn with such sensory exactness and such acceptance of transience that the poem becomes, without ever stating it, a meditation on mortality.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Keats was not widely recognised during his lifetime — the hostile reviews, his lower-class origins, and his early death all worked against him. His reputation grew slowly through the Victorian period and was established beyond dispute by the early twentieth century. He is now regarded as, alongside Shakespeare and Milton, one of the three greatest English poets.

His letters — among the finest in the language — contain some of the most important critical ideas of the Romantic period, including “Negative Capability” (the ability to remain in uncertainty and doubt without reaching after fact and reason) and the concept of the “chameleon poet.”

Key Works

• Poems (1817)
• Endymion: A Poetic Romance (1818)
• Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820)
• Letters of John Keats (various editions)

Collecting Keats

John Keats first editions are among the most valuable items in English Romantic literature, combining canonical stature with genuine rarity.

Poems (1817, C. & J. Ollier, London) is the first book. Published in a very small edition (probably 500 copies), it sold poorly; Ollier transferred the remaining stock to another publisher. Fine copies bring $20,000–$60,000. The binding is boards with a paper spine label.

Endymion: A Poetic Romance (1818, Taylor and Hessey, London) was published in a run of perhaps 500 copies. Fine copies in the original drab boards with the paper spine label bring $10,000–$30,000.

Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820, Taylor and Hessey) is the volume that contains the great odes and is the most important Keats first edition. Published in an edition of perhaps 500 copies, fine copies bring $30,000–$100,000. This is one of the most valuable volumes of English Romantic poetry.

Keats autograph material is of extreme rarity and extraordinary value. His letters — of which approximately 250 survive — are among the greatest literary letters in any language. They are held principally at Harvard (the Houghton Library), the British Library, and the Keats-Shelley Memorial House in Rome. Any Keats autograph item that reached the market would be a major event commanding prices in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The Keats-Shelley Memorial House, at 26 Piazza di Spagna, Rome — the house where Keats died — is a museum and library that is itself a collecting institution of the first importance.