John Keats

"Keats" redirects here. For other uses, see Keats (disambiguation).

Portrait of John Keats by William Hilton. National Portrait Gallery, London

John Keats (Template:Pron-en; 31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821) was the last born of the English Romantic poets and, at 25, the youngest to die. Along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, he was one of the key figures in the second generation of the Romantic movement, despite the fact that his work had been in publication for only four years before his death. During his life, his poems were not generally well received by critics; however, his reputation grew and he held significant posthumous influence on many later poets, including Alfred Tennyson and Wilfred Owen.

The poetry of Keats is characterised by sensual imagery, most notably in the series of odes. Today his poems and letters are considered as among the most popular and analysed in English literature.

Biography

Early life

John Keats was born on 31 October 1795 to Thomas and Frances Jennings Keats. He was the eldest of their four surviving children—George (1797–1841), Thomas (1799–1818), and Frances Mary "Fanny" (1803–89). A son was lost in infancy. John was born in central London, although there is no clear evidence of the exact location. His father was working as a barman at the Hoop and Swan pub when Keats was born, an establishment Thomas later managed and where the growing family would live for some years. It is now the "Keats at the Globe" pub, a few yards from modern day Moorgate station.

Keats was baptised at St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate and sent to a local dame school as an infant. In the summer of 1803, unable to attend Eton or Harrow because of expense, he was sent to board at the Clarke school in Enfield, close to his grandparents' house. The headmaster, John Clarke, was to become an important influence, mentor and friend, and introduced Keats to a great deal of Renaissance literature including Tasso, Spenser and Chapman's translations. In April 1804, only nine months after Keats had started at Enfield, his father died when he fractured his skull after falling from his horse on a return visit to the school. Thomas died intestate. Frances remarried two months afterwards, but left her new husband soon after and, with her four children, went to live with the children's grandmother, Alice Jennings, in the village of Edmonton. In March 1810, when Keats was 14, his mother died, leaving the children in the custody of their grandmother. Jennings appointed two guardians to take care of the children. That autumn, Keats was removed from Clarke's school to apprentice with Thomas Hammond — a surgeon and apothecary. Charles Cowden Clarke, a close school friend of Keats, described this time as "the most placid time in [Keats's] painful life". He lodged with Hammond and slept in the attic above the surgery.

Early career

Life mask of Keats by Benjamin Haydon, 1816

His first surviving poem—An Imitation of Spenser—comes in 1814, when Keats was nineteen. In 1815, Keats registered as a medical student at Guy's Hospital (now part of King's College London). Within a month of starting, he was accepted for a dressership position within the hospital — a significant promotion with increased responsibility and workload, taking up precious writing time and increasing his ambivalence to working in medicine. Strongly drawn by an ambition inspired by fellow poets such as Leigh Hunt and Byron, but beleaguered by family financial crises that continued to the end of his life, he suffered periods of deep depression. His brother George wrote that John "feared that he should never be a poet, & if he was not he would destroy himself". In 1816, Keats received his apothecary's licence but before the end of the year he announced to his guardian that he had resolved to be a poet, not a surgeon.

Though he continued his work and training at Guy's, Keats was devoting increasing time to the study of literature. In May 1816, Leigh Hunt, greatly admired by Keats, agreed to publish the sonnet O Solitude in his magazine The Examiner, a leading liberal magazine of the day. It is the first appearance of Keats's poems in print and Charles Cowden Clarke refers to it as his friend's "red letter day", first proof that John's ambitions were not ridiculous. In the summer of that year he went down to the coastal town of Margate with Clarke to write. There he began Calidore and initiated the era of his great letter writing.

In October, Clarke personally introduced Keats to the influential Hunt, a close friend of Byron and Shelley. Five months later Poems, the first volume of Keats verse, was published. It was a critical failure but Hunt went on to publish the essay Three Young Poets (Shelley, Keats and Reynolds), along with the sonnet on Chapman's Homer, promising great things to come. He introduced Keats to many prominent men in his circle, including editor of The Times Thomas Barnes, writer Charles Lamb, conductor Vincent Novello and poet John Hamilton Reynolds, who would become a close friend. It was a decisive turning point for Keats. He was established in the public eye as a figure in, what Hunt termed, 'a new school of poetry'. At this time Keats writes to his friend Bailey "I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the imagination — What imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth". This would eventually transmute into the concluding lines of Ode on a Grecian Urn " 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' – that is all / you know on earth, and all ye need to know".

Endymion, on its eventual publication, was also damned by the critics, giving rise to Byron's quip that Keats was ultimately "snuffed out by an article". One particularly harsh review by John Wilson Croker appeared in the April 1818 edition of The Quarterly Review:

[...] It is not, we say, that the author has not powers of language, rays of fancy, and gleams of genius – he has all these; but he is unhappily a disciple of the new school of what has been somewhere called 'Cockney Poetry'; which may be defined to consist of the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language [...] There is hardly a complete couplet enclosing a complete idea in the whole book. He wanders from one subject to another, from the association, not of ideas, but of sounds [...]"

John Gibson Lockhart wrote in Blackwoods Magazine

To witness the disease of any human understanding, however feeble, is distressing; but the spectacle of an able mind reduced to a state of insanity is, of course, ten times more afflicting. It is with such sorrow as this that we have contemplated the case of Mr John Keats. [...] He was bound apprentice some years ago to a worthy apothecary in town. But all has been undone by a sudden attack of the malady [...] For some time we were in hopes that he might get off with a violent fit or two; but of late the symptoms are terrible. The phrenzy of the "Poems" was bad enough in its way; but it did not alarm us half so seriously as the calm, settled, imperturbable drivelling idiocy of Endymion. [...] It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the [apothecary] shop Mr John, back to ‘plasters, pills, and ointment boxes’.

It was Lockhart at Blackwoods who had coined the defamatory term "the Cockney School" for Hunt and his circle, including William Hazlitt and, squarely, Keats. The dismissal was as much political as literary—aimed at upstart young writers deemed "uncouth" for their lack of education, non-formal rhyming and "low diction". They had not attended Eton, Harrow or Oxbridge colleges and they were not from the upper classes.

In bad health and unhappy with living in London, in April 1817 Keats moved with his brothers into rooms at 1 Well Walk. Both John and George nursed their brother Tom, who was suffering from tuberculosis. The house in Hampstead was close to Hunt and others from his circle, as well as the senior poet Coleridge who at the time lived in Highgate.

In June 1818, Keats began a walking journey around Scotland, Ireland and the Lake district with his friend Charles Armitage Brown. George and his wife Georgina accompanied them as far as Lancaster and then headed to Liverpool, from where the couple would emigrate to America. In July, while on the Isle of Mull for the walking tour, Keats caught a bad cold and "was too thin and fevered to proceed on the journey". On his return south, Keats continued to nurse Tom, exposing himself to the highly infectious disease. Some biographers suggest that this is when tuberculosis – his "family disease" – first takes hold. Tom Keats died on 1 December 1818.

Wentworth Place

Wentworth Place (left)

John Keats moved to the newly built Wentworth Place, owned by his friend Charles Armitage Brown, also on the edge of Hampstead Heath, just a ten-minute walk south of his old home in Well Walk. This winter of 1818, though troubled, marks the beginning of Keats's annus mirabilis in which he wrote his most mature work. He had been greatly inspired by a series of recent lectures by Hazlitt on English poets and poetic identity. Keats composed five of his six great odes there in April and May and, although it is debated in which order they were written, Ode to Psyche starts the series. According to Brown, Ode to a Nightingale was composed under a mulberry tree in the garden.

Brown wrote,

In the spring of 1819 a nightingale had built her nest near my house. Keats felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song; and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast-table to the grass-plot under a plum-tree, where he sat for two or three hours. When he came into the house, I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his hand, and these he was quietly thrusting behind the books. On inquiry, I found those scraps, four or five in number, contained his poetic feelings on the song of our nightingale.

Dilke, co-owner of the house, strenuously denied the story, printed in Milnes' 1848 biography of Keats, dismissing it as "pure delusion".

In 1819, Keats wrote The Eve of St. Agnes, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Hyperion, Lamia and Otho (critically damned and not dramatised until 1950). The poems Fancy and Bards of passion and of mirth were inspired by the gardens. In September, very short of money, he approached his publishers with a new book of poems. They were unimpressed with the collection, finding the presented versions of Lamia confusing, and describing St Agnes as having a "sense of pettish disgust" and "a 'Don Juan' style of mingling up sentiment and sneering [...] a poem unfit for ladies". The final volume Keats lived to see—Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems—was eventually published in July 1820. It received greater acclaim than had Endymion or Poems, finding favourable notices in both The Examiner and Edinburgh Review.

Wentworth Place now houses the Keats House museum.

Fanny Brawne and Isabella Jones

Main article: Fanny Brawne

Ambrotype of Fanny Brawne taken circa 1850 (photograph on glass)

Letters and poem drafts suggest that Keats first met Frances (Fanny) Brawne between September and November 1818. It is likely that the 18-year-old Brawne was visiting the Dilke family at Wentworth Place, before she lived there. Like Keats, Brawne was a Londoner – born in the hamlet of West End near Hampstead on 9 August 1800. Her grandfather had kept a London inn, as Keats's father had done, and had also lost several members of her family to tuberculosis. She shared her first name with both Keats's sister and mother. Fanny had a talent for dress-making, as well as for languages and repartee. She wrote, "I am not a great poetry reader" but that she had "a natural theatrical bent". During November 1818 an intimacy sprang up between Keats and Brawne but was very much shadowed by the impending death of Tom Keats, whom John was nursing.

That year, he met another woman for whom he felt a conflicted passion – Isabella Jones – "beautiful, talented, witty". He had met her in Hastings while on holiday in June. He "frequented her rooms" in the winter of 1818–19, and says in his letters to George that he "warmed with her" and "kissed her", though it is unclear how close they ultimately became. Biographers debate how influential she was to Keats's writing. Gittings maintained that The Eve of St Agnes and The Eve of St Mark were suggested by her, that the lyric Hush, Hush! ["o sweet Isabel"] was about her and the first version of Bright Star might well have been for her.

On 3 April 1819, Brawne and her widowed mother moved into the other half of Dilke's Wentworth Place and Keats and Brawne were able to see each other every day. Keats began to lend Brawne books, such as Dante's Inferno, and they would read together. He gave her the love sonnet – Bright Star (perhaps revised for her). It was a work in progress and he continued to work on the poem until the last months of his life. The poem came to be forever associated with their relationship. "It was", says Gittings, "a declaration of his love. [...] All his desires were concentrated on Fanny". From this point we have no documented mention of Isabella Jones again.

Sometime before the end of June, he at last arrived at some sort of understanding with Brawne. This was far from a formal engagement; he still had far too little to offer. Keats endured great conflict knowing his expectations as a struggling poet in increasingly hard financial straits would preclude marriage to Brawne. Their love remained unconsummated; jealousy for his unbound 'Star' began to gnaw at him. Darkness, disease and depression were close in around him and are reflected in poems of the time such as The Eve of St. Agnes and La Belle Dame sans Merci where love and death both stalk. "I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks" he wrote to her "your loveliness and the hour of my death". Keats writes to Brawne in another of his many hundreds of notes and letters:

My love has made me selfish. I cannot exist without you — I am forgetful of every thing but seeing you again — my Life seems to stop there — I see no further. You have absorb'd me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving — I should be exquisitely miserable without the hope of soon seeing you. [...] I have been astonished that Men could die Martyrs for religion — I have shudder'd at it — I shudder no more — I could be martyr'd for my Religion — Love is my religion — I could die for that — I could die for you. (Letter, 13 October 1819).

Tuberculosis took hold and he was advised to move to a warmer country by his doctors. In September 1820 they had their final parting. Keats left for Rome and they both knew it was very likely they'd never see each other again. He died there five months later.

None of Brawne's letters to Keats survive, though we have his own letters. As the poet had requested, Brawne's were destroyed upon his death. She stayed in mourning for Keats for six years. In 1833, more than 12 years after his death, she married and went on to have three children, outliving Keats by more than 40 years.

Death

During 1820, Keats displayed increasingly serious symptoms of tuberculosis, to the extent that he suffered two lung haemorrhages in the first few days of February. He lost large amounts of blood and was bled further by the attending physician. Hunt nursed him in London for much of the summer. At the suggestion of his doctors, he agreed to move to Italy with his friend Joseph Severn. On 13 September, they left for Gravesend and four days later boarded the sailing brig The Maria Crowther. Keats wrote his final revisions of Bright Star aboard the ship. The journey was a minor catastrophe – storms broke out followed by a dead calm that slowed the ship’s progress. When it finally docked in Naples, the ship was held in quarantine for ten days because of a suspected outbreak of cholera in Britain. Keats reached Rome on November 14 by which time all hope of a warmer climate had evaporated.

Keats's House in Rome

On arrival in Italy, he moved into a villa on the Spanish Steps in Rome – today the Keats-Shelley Memorial House museum. Despite care from Severn and Dr. John Clark, his health rapidly deteriorated. The medical attention Keats received may have hastened his death. In November 1820, Clark declared that the source of his illness was "mental exertion" and that the source was largely situated in his stomach. Clark eventually diagnosed consumption (tuberculosis) and placed Keats on a starvation diet of an anchovy and a piece of bread a day – this was intended to reduce the blood flow to his stomach. He also bled the poet; a standard treatment of the day, but was likely a significant contributor to Keats's weakness.

Keats's friend Brown writes:

They could have used opium in small doses, and Keats had asked Severn to buy a bottle of opium when they were setting off on their voyage. What Severn didn't realise was that Keats saw it as a possible resource if he wanted to commit suicide. He tried to get the bottle from Severn on the voyage but Severn wouldn't let him have it. Then in Rome he tried again. [...] Severn was in such a quandary he didn't know what to do, so in the end he went to the doctor who took it away. As a result Keats went through dreadful agonies with nothing to ease the pain at all.

This Grave / contains all that was Mortal / of a / Young English Poet / Who / on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his Heart / at the Malicious Power of his Enemies / Desired / these Words to be / engraven on his Tomb Stone: / Here lies One / Whose Name was writ in Water
24 February 1821

There is a discrepancy of one day between the official date of death and the grave marking. Severn and Brown had added their lines to the stone in protest at the critical reception of Keats's work. Hunt blamed his death on the scathing attack of "Endymion" by the Quarterly Review. Seven weeks after the funeral, Shelley memorialised Keats in his poem Adonaïs. Clark saw to the planting daisies on the grave, saying that Keats would have wished it. For public health reasons, the Italian health authorities burned the furniture in Keats's room, scraped the walls, made new windows, doors and flooring.

In 2009, Marsh wrote, "In the old part of the graveyard, barely a field when Keats was buried here, there are now umbrella pines, myrtle shrubs, roses, and carpets of wild violets. [...] Shelley, one of Keats’s most fervent champions, is also buried here"and Severn is buried next the friend he nursed till the end.

Biographical controversy

Nobody who had known Keats ever wrote a full biography of Keats's life. Shortly after Keats's death in 1821, his publishers Taylor and Hessey announced they would speedily publish The memoirs and Remains of John Keats but his friends refused to co-operate with the venture and so it was scuppered. There were "biographical jottings of varying natures and values" about the poet who had become a figure within artistic circles – including prolific notes, chapters and letters from his many artist and writer friends. These, however, often give contradictory or heavily biased accounts of events and were subject to quarrels and rifts.

His friends Brown, Severn, Dilke, Shelley and Hunt, his guardian Richard Abbey, his publisher Taylor, Fanny Brawne and many others issued posthumous commentary on Keats's life. These early writings coloured all subsequent biography and have become embedded into a body of Keats legend. Shelley promoted Keats as someone whose achievement could not be separated from agony, who was 'spiritualised' by his decline, and simply too fine-tuned to endure the buffetings of the world. This is the consumptive, suffering image popularly held today.

After much dithering, the first official biography was published in 1848 by Richard Monckton Milnes (1809–1885). Landmark Keats biographers since, include Sidney Colvin (1845–1927), Robert Gittings (1911–1992), Walter Jackson Bate (1918–1999) and Andrew Motion (b. 1952).

Poetry

Relief on wall near his grave in Rome

When Keats died at the age of 25, he had been seriously writing poetry for barely six years — from 1814 until the summer of 1820 – and publishing for four. His first poem, the sonnet O Solitude appeared in the Examiner in May 1816, while his collection Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes and other poems came in July 1820 before his final voyage to Rome. The compression of his poetic apprenticeship and maturity into so short a time is just one remarkable aspect of Keats's work. Although he was prolific during his short writing life, and is now one of the most studied and admired of British poets, his reputation rests on a fairly small body of work, centered on the Odes.

Poetry did not come easy to Keats. Throughout his life he maintained a strong sense of the particular and fantastic, yet his early work was unremarkable and roundly dismissed by some critics who saw his position as only afforded by his influential friends. Keats's most successful verse came as a result of a deliberate and prolonged self-education in classical literature. Although he said "if poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all", and he may have possessed an innate poetic sensibility, his early works were of a poet learning his craft. According to literary historian William Walsh it was often vague – "infatuated by the...languorously narcotic which often dimmed his clear eye for the objective". It was only in the creative outpouring in the last years of his short life that he was able to express in craft the inner intensity for which he is has been lauded since his death. Keats felt he had made no mark in his lifetime. Knowing he was dying, he had written to Fanny Brawne in February 1820, "I have left no immortal work behind me — nothing to make my friends proud of my memory — but I have lov'd the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember'd."

It is believed that, in his lifetime, sales of Keats's three volumes of poetry amounted to only 200 copies. Yet, Motion argues: "When he died at the tragically early age of 25, his admirers praised him for thinking "on his pulses" – for having developed a style which was more heavily loaded with sensualities, more gorgeous in its effects, more voluptuously alive to actualities than any poet who had come before him." In his own words, Keats sought to "load every rift" with ore.

Keats's skills were acknowledged in his lifetime by influential allies such as Shelley, Hunt and to a lesser extent Byron; however, he received harsh reviews from critics and publishers. Shelley had corresponded often with Keats when he was ill in Rome. He later felt that Keats's death had been brought on by bad reviews in the Quarterly Review and seven weeks after the funeral wrote Adonaïs, a despairing elegy of 495 lines and 55 Spenserian stanzas. It was published that July and he came to view as his "least imperfect" work. He felt that Keats's early death was a personal and public tragedy:

[...] The loveliest and the last,
The bloom, whose petals nipped before they blew
Died on the promise of the fruit.

Thirty years later Keats's ignominious public profile began to alter. With Milnes's full biography in 1848 and Tennyson as his champion, Keats's work slowly entered the established canon of English literature. In 1882, Swinburne wrote in the Encyclopedia Britannica that "the Ode to a Nightingale, [is] one of the final masterpieces of human work in all time and for all ages". Vendler at Harvard says the odes "are a group of works in which the English language find ultimate embodiment". Professor Bate declared of To Autumn: "Each generation has found it one of the most nearly perfect poems in English" and M. R. Ridley claimed the ode "is the most serenely flawless poem in our language."

Letters

Keats and his friends were prolific letter writers – poets, novelists, editors. When his brother George goes to America, Keats writes to him in great detail – the body of letters becoming "the real diary of his life" – an exposition of his philosophy, self-revelation and first drafts of poems containing some of Keats's finest writing and thought. According to Strachan, "Keats's entertaining and illuminating letters rank highly in the history of all English literary correspondence".

In the letters he coined ideas such as Negative capability, The Chameleon Poet and the Mansion of Many Apartments. They came to gain common currency and capture the public imagination, despite only making single appearances as phrases in his correspondence. "My Imagination is a Monastry and I am its Monk", he writes to Shelley. In a letter to George he calls the world "the vale of Soul-making", again and again turning to the question of what it means to be a poet.

In a letter to George, he describes Negative capability as the poetic state in which we are "capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason. [...Being] content with half knowledge" where one trusts in the heart's perceptions. He writes later "I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of Imagination – What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth – whether it existed before or not – for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty."

In his letter to Richard Woodhouse, October 27, 1818, he famously describes the empty potential of the poetical character:

[It] has no self – it is every thing and nothing – It has no character – it enjoys light and shade; [...] What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion [chameleon] Poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation. A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity – he is continually in for – and filling some other Body – The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute – the poet has none; no identity – he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God's Creatures.

On 21 September, Keats wrote to Reynolds

"How beautiful the season is now—How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it  ... I never lik'd the stubbled fields as much as now—Aye, better than the chilly green of spring. Somehow the stubble plain looks warm—in the same way as some pictures look warm—this struck me so much in my Sunday's walk that I composed upon it".

The final stanza of his last great ode: "To Autumn" runs:

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,-
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue; [...]

Long after his death, To Autumn would go on to become one of the most highly regarded poems in the English language.

Legacy

Main article: List of references to John Keats

• The death of Keats inspired Shelley to write the poem Adonais.
• Byron later composed a short poem on Shelley's theme employing the phrase "snuffed out by an article." However, Byron, far less admiring of the poetry of Keats than Shelley and generally more cynical in nature, was here probably just as much poking fun at Shelley's interpretation as he was having a dig at the critics.
• The largest collection of the letters, manuscripts, and other papers of Keats is in the Houghton Library at Harvard University. Other collections of such material can be found at the British Library; Keats House, Hampstead; the Keats-Shelley Memorial House in Rome; and the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York.
• Keats in Hampstead, is a play about Keats and Brawne, written and directed by James Veitch. It has been regularly been performed at Keats House, Hampstead.
• The 1845 short story "P.'s Correspondence" by Nathaniel Hawthorne, one of the earliest works of alternate history, speculated on what Keats' later life would have been like – especially, what further poetry he would have composed – had he not died so young.
• The 2009 film Bright Star, written and directed by Jane Campion, focuses on Keats' relationship with Fanny Brawne.
• Since 1998 the British Keats-Shelley Memorial Association have annually awarded a poetry prize. The organisation encourages poets to "respond personally to the emotions aroused in them by the work of the Romantics".

Collected works of Keats

Main article: John Keats bibliography

• The Complete Poetical Works and Letters of John Keats ed. Horace Elisha Scudder, Boston: Riverside Press (1899)
• The Complete Poetical Works of John Keats ed. H. Buxton Forman. Oxford University Press (1907)
• The Letters of John Keats 1814–1821 Volumes 1 and 2 ed. Hyder Edward Rollins. Harvard University Press (1958)
• The Poems of John Keats ed. Jack Stillinger Harvard University Press (1978)
• Complete Poems ed. Jack Stillinger. Harvard University Press (1982)
• John Keats: Poetry Manuscripts at Harvard, a Facsimile Edition. ed. Jack Stillinger. Harvard University Press (1990) ISBN 0674477758
• Selected Letters of John Keats ed. Grant F. Scott. Harvard University Press (2002)
• John Keats. Ed. Susan Wolfson. Longman (2007)

See also

• Negative capability

Bibliography

• Bate, Walter Jackson (1964). John Keats. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
• Brown, Charles Armitage (1937). The Life of John Keats, ed. London: Oxford University Press.
• Brown, Sue (2009). Joseph Severn, A Life: The Rewards of Friendship. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199565023
• Colvin, Sidney (1917). John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends Critics and After-Fame. London: Macmillan.
• Colvin, Sidney (1970). John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics, and After-Fame. New York: Octagon Books.
• Coote, Stephen (1995). John Keats. A Life. London: Hodder & Stoughton.
• De Almeida, Hermione. Romantic Medicine and John Keats. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. ISBN 0195063074
• Gittings, Robert (1954). John Keats: The Living Year. 21 September 1818 to 21 September 1819. London: Heinemann.
• Gittings, Robert (1964). The Keats Inheritance. London: Heinemann.
• Gittings, Robert (1968). John Keats. London: Heinemann.
• Goslee, Nancy (1985). Uriel's Eye: Miltonic Stationing and Statuary in Blake, Keats and Shelley. University of Alabama Press. ISBN 0-8173-0243-3
• Hewlett, Dorothy (3rd rev. ed. 1970). A life of John Keats. London: Hutchinson.
• Hirsch, Edward (Ed). (2001). Complete Poems and Selected Letters of John Keats. Random House Publishing. ISBN 0-3757-5669-8
• Houghton, Richard (Ed). (2008). The Life and Letters of John Keats. Read Books.
• Jones, Michael (1984). "Twilight of the Gods: The Greeks in Schiller and Lukacs". Germanic Review. 59 (2): 49–56. doi:10.1080/00168890.1984.9935401.
• Lachman, Lilach (1988). "History and Temporalization of Space: Keats' Hyperion Poems". Proceedings of the XII Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, edited by Roger Bauer and Douwe Fokkema (Munich, Germany): 159–164.
• G. M. Matthews, ed. (1995). "John Keats: The Critical Heritage". London: Routledge. ISBN 0-4151-3447-1
• Monckton Milnes, Richard, ed. (Lord Houghton) (1848). Life, Letters and Literary Remains of John Keats. 2 vols. London: Edward Moxon.
• Motion, Andrew (1997). Keats. London: Faber.
• O'Neill, Michael & Mahoney Charles (ed.s) (2007). Romantic Poetry: An Annotated Anthology. Blackwell. ISBN 0-6312-1317-1
• Ridley, M. and R. Clarendon (1933). Keats' craftsmanship: a study in poetic development ASIN: B00085UM2I (Out of Print in 2010).
• Scott, Grant F. (1994). The Sculpted Word: Keats, Ekphrasis, and the Visual Arts. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. ISBN 0-87451-679-X
• Stillinger, Jack (1982). Complete Poems. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-6741-5430-4
• Strachan, John (Ed) (2003). A Routledge Literary Sourcebook on the Poems of John Keats. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-4152-3478-6
• Vendler, Helen, (1983). The Odes of John Keats. Belknap Press ISBN 0674630769
• Walsh, John Evangelist (1999). Darkling I Listen: The Last Days and Death of John Keats. New York: St. Martin's Press.
• Walsh, William (1957). "John Keats", in From Blake to Byron. Middlesex: Penguin.
• Ward, Aileen (1963). John Keats: The Making of a Poet. London: Secker & Warburg.
• Wolfson, Susan J. (1986). The Questioning Presence. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. ISBN 0-8014-1909-3

Further reading

• Kirkland, John (2008). Love Letters of Great Men, Vol. 1. CreateSpace Publishing.
• Lowell, Amy (1925). John Keats. 2 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
• Parson, Donald (1954). Portraits of Keats. Cleveland: World Publishing Co.
• Plumly, Stanley (2008). Posthumous Keats. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
• Richardson, Joanna (1963). The Everlasting Spell. A Study of Keats and His Friends. London: Cape
• Richardson, Joanna (1980). Keats and His Circle. An Album of Portraits. London: Cassell.
• Rossetti, William Michael (1887). The Life and Writings of John Keats. London: Walter Scott.
• Turley, Richard Marggraf (2004). Keats' Boyish Imagination. London: Routledge, ISBN 9780415288828

External links

• John Keats at the Houghton Library
• John Keats at the British Library
• Keats House, Hampstead
• The Keats-Shelley House in Rome
• John Keats at the National Portrait Gallery
• Selected Works at Poetry Index
• "'Once More the Poet': Keats, Severn and the Grecian Lyre". Article by John Curtis Franklin about Severn's role in the design of Keats' tombstone, Protestant Cemetery, Rome
• Works by John Keats at Project Gutenberg (plain text and HTML)
• Complete Poetical Works
• Keats' Poetry and commentary at Oldpoetry.com
• Romantic Circles—Excellent Editions & Articles on Keats and other Authors of the Romantic period
• The Life of John Keats: a memoir by his friend Charles Armitage Brown
• The Life and Work of John Keats