KEATS, JOHN. - English poet, b. in London on 31 Oct. 1795, d. in Rome on 23 Feb. 1821. He received a good education and was favoured by one of his teachers, C. C. Clarke, who later introduced him to the reading of poets, especially Spenser and Homer in Chapman’s translation. In London he met Hunt, Shelley, Hazlitt, Wordsworth, and the painter Haydon, who explained Greek sculpture to him.
In 1816 he abandoned medicine, which he had hitherto pursued, for poetry; in 1817 he published a first volume of verse that met with an unfavourable reception, and in 1818 the poem Endymion, which was harshly criticised.
Kaunitz, Anton Wenzel - Portrait.
In the same year he conceived a feverish and unhappy romantic and exacerbated passion for a Fanny Brawne, a passion well attested in his correspondence. Having fallen gravely ill with tuberculosis, he was sent to Italy shortly after the publication of a second volume of verse containing Hyperion. After a few months’ stay in Naples, he went to Rome, where he died in a house on Piazza di Spagna (now converted into a museum and library), and is buried in the old non-Catholic cemetery at the Pyramid of Caius Cestius.
In his lyrics inspired by classical and medieval themes, he appears as a romantic worshipper of beauty, exalted as the incarnation of the spirit of truth which, so to speak, it consecrates in the forms of art (a notion partly taken up in aesthetic criticism by Ruskin); the best of Keats’s odes possess an unsurpassable formal perfection, and the poet’s influence on English lyric poetry in general, and in particular on the so-called decadents, has been incalculable, even though his imitators often distorted his aesthetic message in the name of the absoluteness of art.