Hunt's house was the centre of a circle of men of literary tastes, and here Keats met J. H. Reynolds and James Rice, who both became friends of his ; Shelley, to whom Keats did not take as kindly as Shelley did to him; and Haydon, with whom he at once became intimate. Hunt had already (May 16 and Dec. 1, 1816) printed verse of Keats' in the Examiner, and the circle decided that a volume must be published. The 011iers firm under took its production, and it came out in March 1817 as Poems, by John Keats. It is a collection of youthful work, full of promise but not of much else, though in Sleep and Poetry there is an interesting passage that expresses the aspirations of the new school of poetry. The substance of the book is six poems in heroic couplets, three of them poetic epistles. They are more interesting for their style than for their matter, and show various methods of varying the monotony of the measure, such as fre quent use of overflow, dissyllabic rhymes, the shortening of the second line, and so on.
In April 1817 Keats went away by himself to the Isle of Wight, urged especially by Haydon to solitude and concentration. He took rooms at Carisbrooke, and began to work at Endymion. In May he moved to Margate, where he received an advance pay ment on the poem from Taylor and Hessey. After a stay in Canterbury with Tom, the two brothers came to Hampstead early in the summer, where they settled down. Hunt lived near, and Keats . made two new friends near by, Charles Wentworth Dilke and Charles Brown. By the late summer, when he went to stay in Oxford, he had reached the third book of Endymion. He returned to Hampstead in the autumn, to find that the attack in Blackwood on the "Cockney school" had just begun; there were also dissensions between Reynolds and Haydon, and Haydon and Hunt, which distressed him. At Christmas he took Reynolds's place as dramatic critic on the Champion for a while, and on Dec. 28 he was at Haydon's famous dinner party, with Words worth, Lamb and Monkhouse. In the first two months of this year he had a burst of poetic activity, and at one time wrote a new poem nearly every day. This period includes Hence Burgundy Claret and Port, When I have fears that I may cease to be, and the sonnet on the Nile. At this time also he and Reynolds had the idea of publishing a book of tales from Boccaccio, which was the origin of Isabella. In March he went to Teignmouth to look after Tom, George having decided to marry and go abroad, and there Isabella was written. He and Tom came back to Hampstead in May, and about this time Endymion was published (1818). Of this poem all that need be said in criticism has been said by Keats himself in the preface. The basis of it is the story of Endymion and the moon goddess, but it has been allegorised and mixed with other myths, and incidents of his own invention, till it becomes something en tirely new. The metre is again the heroic couplet, treated with the same freedom as before, and relieved with incidental lyrics. The strength and weakness of the poem lie in the same feature, his intense and luxuriant imagination, that is ever bursting with new beauties, but, being more or less undisciplined, has the poet at its mercy, and leads to a certain dissipation of interest and lack of cohesion in the poem as a whole.
In the summer of this year Keats went with Brown on a walking tour in the north. George Keats and his wife were starting for America, and the two friends went with them to Liverpool, and thence to Lancaster, where the tour started. They
walked through the Lake district to Carlisle, took a coach to Dumfries, and wandered about the coast for some time, finally crossing to Ireland for a day or two. Then they went on up the coast to Ayr, and so by Glasgow and Inverary to Oban. Exertion and exposure were already affecting Keats's throat, and when, after climbing Ben Nevis, they reached Inverness, a doctor advised him to go home, and he sailed from Cromarty for London. This throat trouble brought on by the hardships of the tour was the first sign of the consumption that killed him. Simultaneously with his return the attacks in the Reviews developed in earnest ; the August number of Blackwood's contained No. IV. of the "Cockney school" articles, devoted entirely to Keats this time, probably by Wilson or' Lockhart ; in September followed the review of Endymion in the Quarterly, in the same strain. Perhaps it should be added that there is no foundation for the belief that Keats' death was hastened by the treatment he received in the Reviews. He took it quite calmly, and at this time was quite preoccupied with a more personal trouble. He returned to find his brother Tom much worse, and the rest of the year was de voted to nursing him. He died in the first week in December. After Tom's death Keats went to live with Brown at Wentworth Place, Hampstead, and was soon settled to work on Hyperion.
And now a new distraction was to come into his life, and never to leave it. Fanny Brawne was the eldest daughter of a lady who had taken Brown's house while they were away in the north, and was now living close by. Keats met her at the Dilkes', and was soon completely enslaved. She was an attractive girl, and con stant to Keats through the troubles that were to follow; his friends thought that she was no fit mate for him, but what woman would have been? The effect of this passion, to which Keats gave himself up with all the violence of an extraordinarily ardent nature, seems in the end to have been further to strain a constitution already giving way under incipient consumption, but at the moment it only stimulated his poetic energies. During a visit to Sussex with Dilke in January he finished The Eve of St. Agnes, and began the unfinished Eve of St. Mark; he came back to Hampstead in February, and that spring saw another burst of activity. Between now and June all but one of the great Odes were written ; On Indolence can be dated from his correspondence to about March 19, On a Grecian Urn was sent to his brother on April 15, and To a Nightingale a week or two later. Yet just at this time his prospects, darkened by his reception by the Reviews, seemed so bad that he was thinking of giving up poetry altogether; Brown dissuaded him, and lent him enough to live on through the summer. In July he went to stay with Rice in Shanklin, and later Brown came and Rice left. He and Brown now collaborated in Otho the Great, Brown outlining the scenes and Keats working them out, until they came to the fourth act, when Keats took entire command. At the same time he was writing Lamia. From August to September they stayed at Winchester, where, in the last good days of his life, he finished Lamia, added to and abandoned the Eve of St. Mark and Hyperion, and wrote the Ode to Autumn. He also started King Stephen, which he left unfinished.