'O soft embalmer of the still midnight,/ Shutting, with careful fingers and benign,/ Our gloom-pleas'd eyes, embower'd from the light, / Enshaded in forgetfulness divine' John Keats, 'Ode to Sleep'
John Keats was born in London in 1795. He trained as a surgeon and
apothecary but quickly abandoned this profession for poetry.
His first volume of poetry was published in 1817, soon after he had
begun an influential friendship with the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe
Shelley. His first collection and the subsequent long poem Endymion
recieved mixed reviews, and sales were poor.
In late 1818 he moved to Hampstead where he met and fell deeply in
love with his neighbour Fanny Brawne. During the following year
Keats wrote some of his most famous works, including 'The Eve of
St. Agnes', 'Ode to a Nightingale' and 'La Belle Dame sans
Merci'.
He was however increasingly plagued by ill-health and financial
troubles, which led him to break off his engagement to Fanny. Soon
after the publication of Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes and
Other Poems in 1820, Keats left England for Italy in the hope that
the climate would improve his health. But Keats was by this time
suffering from advanced tuberculosis, and he died on February 23rd
1821.
On his request, Keats' tombstone reads only 'Here lies one whose
name was writ in water'.
Littered with sensuous descriptions of nature's beauty, Keats's
odes also pose profound philosophical questions
*Sunday Telegraph*
Sublime
*Sunday Times*
In what we call natural magic, he ranks with Shakespeare...no-one
else in English poetry has...his perception of loveliness
*Matthew Arnold*
One of the half-dozen greatest English writers
*Edmund Wilson*
His letters are certainly the most notable and most important ever
written by any English poet
*T.S. Eliot*
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