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John Keats was born on 31 October 1795 in Moorfields, London, the eldest of four surviving children of Thomas Keats, who managed a livery stable, and Frances Jennings. His father died after a riding accident in 1804, and his mother died of tuberculosis in 1810. At John Clarke’s school in Enfield he became a passionate reader, encouraged by the headmaster’s son, Charles Cowden Clarke. In 1810 he was apprenticed to a surgeon and apothecary in Edmonton, and in 1815 he entered Guy’s Hospital in London, qualifying as an apothecary in 1816 before giving up medicine for poetry.
Through Leigh Hunt, editor of The Examiner, Keats met Shelley, Hazlitt, the painter Benjamin Haydon, and John Hamilton Reynolds. Hunt printed his sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” in December 1816, and Keats’s first collection, Poems, appeared in March 1817. His long romance Endymion (1818), which opens “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever,” was savagely reviewed in Blackwood’s Magazine and the Quarterly Review.
In 1818 Keats nursed his younger brother Tom, who died of tuberculosis in December, and moved into Wentworth Place in Hampstead with his friend Charles Brown. There he fell in love with his neighbor Fanny Brawne, to whom he became engaged. The following year brought an extraordinary burst of work: “The Eve of St. Agnes,” “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” the great odes, “Lamia,” and “To Autumn,” written after a walk near Winchester in September 1819. His third and final book, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, was published in July 1820.
By then Keats was gravely ill with tuberculosis. On medical advice he sailed for Italy in September 1820 with the painter Joseph Severn, and he died in Rome on 23 February 1821, aged twenty-five. He was buried in the Protestant Cemetery under a stone he asked to bear the words “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.” Shelley mourned him in Adonais, and his letters, with their ideas of “negative capability” and the “vale of Soul-making,” are now read almost as widely as his poems.
The poem texts on Poetry Catalog follow public domain Project Gutenberg editions of Keats’s 1817 and 1820 volumes, with a few poems first published after his death, so punctuation and wording may differ slightly from other editions. For the linked list of his poems on this site, visit John Keats Poems.