KEATS, JOHN (1795-1821), English poet, was born in London on Oct. 29 or 31, 1795. His father, Thomas Keats, had come to London from the West Country, and was at this time managing a livery stable, having married the daughter of the proprietor, Frances Jennings. John Keats was their eldest son, and was born prematurely. He was sent to a school kept by the Rev. John Clarke at Enfield, and soon after lost his father, who was killed by a fall from his horse on April 16, 1804. His mother married again within the year, but was soon separated from her new husband, and went to live with her mother, Mrs. Jennings, at Edmonton ; this was Keats' home for the next few years. At school, Keats was not remarkable for anything very much except an intense pugnacity, vented frequently even on his brother 1 George, then and afterwards one of the closest of his friends.
Tom, the youngest brother, was already delicate, and had to be looked of ter by the other two; the family sentiment between them was always strong, and only his brothers were allowed to see the strain of melancholy that lay beneath his surface high spirits. With the school as a whole he was very popular. Towards the end of his time, in his fourteenth and fifteenth years, he suddenly turned to study, and read widely in addition to his school work, particularly in mythology. He also started a trans lation of the Aeneid into English prose. In February his mother, to whom he was passionately attached, died of consumption. His grandmother put the boys under the care of two guardians, Rowland Sandell and Richard Abbey. At the end of 1810 Mr. Abbey had Keats apprenticed to Hammond, a surgeon of Edmon ton. About this time he finished his translation of the Aeneid. He used often to walk over to the school at Enfield to see Cowden Clarke, the son of the headmaster, and one of the books Clarke lent him was the Faerie Queene. This inspired him to his first efforts at poetry, though it was not till two years later, in 1815, that he showed any of his work to Clarke.
In the summer or autumn of 1814 he quarrelled with Ham mond, and went to live in London, studying at St. Thomas's and Guy's Hospitals. He lodged, first in the Borough by himself, then in St. Thomas street with fellow-students ; in the summer of 1816 he joined his brothers in the Poultry, and in spring 1817 they moved to Cheapside. He worked steadily at first, and passed
his examination as licentiate in July 1816. But his real inclina tions were beginning to appear, and it seems to have been at some time in the winter 1816-1817 that he decided to devote himself entirely to poetry. In literature his passion, then as always, was for the Elizabethan age, but his early verses written at this time, such as On Death (1814), To Hope and To Apollo (Feb. 1815), are in a typically 18th century style, full of per sonified abstractions of the Passions and the like. Early in 1815 Clarke came to live in London, and it was after a night spent in the study of Chapman that Keats sent him the famous sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, the first poem in which he unmistakably finds his voice.
Soon after this Clarke introduced him to Leigh Hunt, who had a profound influence on him, as he had on other men far greater than himself. Hunt's critical aim was the sound and valuable one of overthrowing the "classical" school and inaugurating a return to the natural freedom of the great age of English poetry; this cause prevailed, however much or little Hunt may have had to do with it, as everybody knows, and the Return to Nature, or the Romantic Revival, won the day. At the same time Hunt tried to put his own specific ideas of verse construction, the central point of which was the freer form of the heroic couplet, into practice in Rimini, and whatever his critical gifts Hunt was no poet. Keats adopted the same method, and while the free form of the heroic couplet was fertile of good results in his hands, he also seems to have been infected with Hunt's worst fault, the tendency to lapse into a casual pertness of diction that at times gives some colour to the gibes of Blackwood about the "Cockney school." This tendency is occasionally noticeable in Keats' earlier work, but is far more disastrous when it intrudes, as it does once or twice, into the splendour of his maturity; it is such lines as I'll soon be back"; said she, in Isabella, and That Lycius could not love in half a fright in Lamia, for which we have a serious grudge against Hunt. In addition to his influence on Keats' style, Hunt had a considerable effect on his fortunes; it was Keats' friendship with Hunt that was his real crime in the eyes of the Reviews.