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 favored by one of his teachers, C. C. Clarke, who later introduced him to the reading of the poets, especially Spenser and Homer in Chapman's version. In London he met Hunt, Shelley, Hazlitt, Wordsworth and the painter Haydon, who illustrated Greek sculpture for him.
In 1816 he abandoned medicine, which he had pursued until then, for poetry; in 1817 he published a first volume of verse that was received unfavorably, and in 1818 the poem Endymion, which was harshly criticized.
In the same year he conceived a feverish and unhappy romantic and exasperated passion for a Fanny Brawne, a passion well attested in his letters. Having fallen gravely ill with consumption, he was sent to Italy, shortly after the publication of a second volume of verse that contained Hyperion. After a stay of a few months in Naples, he moved on to Rome, where he died in a house on Piazza di Spagna (now used as a museum and library) and is buried in the old Protestant cemetery at the pyramid of Gaius Cestius.
In his lyrics of classical and medieval inspiration he shows himself a romantic adorer of beauty, exalted as the incarnation of the spirit of truth that it, so to speak, consecrates in the forms of art (a notion taken up in part in the field of aesthetic criticism by Ruskin); the best among K.'s "odes" possess an unequaled 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 if his imitators have often misrepresented his aesthetic message in the name of the absoluteness of art.
Bibliography2 works
Augusto Guidi