KEATS, JOHN. — English poet, born in London on 31 October 1795, died in Rome on 23 February 1821. He received a good education and was encouraged 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 introduced him to Greek sculpture.
In 1816 he abandoned medicine, which he had hitherto pursued, for poetry; in 1817 he published a first volume of verse, unfavorably received, and in 1818 the poem Endymion, which was harshly criticized.
That same year he conceived a feverish and unhappy romantic and exasperated passion for a certain Fanny Brawne, a passion amply documented in his correspondence. Having fallen gravely ill with consumption, he was sent to Italy shortly after the publication of a second volume of verse containing Hyperion. After a stay of a few months in Naples, he went to Rome, where he died in a house in Piazza di Spagna (now converted into a museum and library) and is buried in the old non-Catholic cemetery at the pyramid of Gaius Cestius.
In his lyrics of classical and medieval inspiration, he reveals himself as a Romantic worshipper of beauty, exalted as the embodiment of the spirit of truth which it, so to speak, consecrates in the forms of art (a notion partly taken up, in the field of aesthetic criticism, by Ruskin); the best of K.’s “odes” possess an unequalled formal perfection, and the poet’s influence on English lyric poetry in general, and particularly on the so-called Decadents, has been incalculable, even though imitators have often distorted his aesthetic message in the name of the absolute nature of art.