55 Facts About John Keats

John Keats was an English poet of the second generation of Romantic poets, with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley.

John Keats's poems had been in publication for less than four years when he died of tuberculosis at the age of 25.

John Keats had a style "heavily loaded with sensualities", notably in the series of odes.

John Keats was the eldest of four surviving children; his younger siblings were George, Thomas, and Frances Mary "Fanny", who later married the Spanish author Valentin Llanos Gutierrez.

John Keats believed he was born at the inn, a birthplace of humble origins, but there is no evidence to support this.

John Keats was baptised at St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate, and sent to a local dame school as a child.

John Keats's parents wished to send their sons to Eton or Harrow, but the family decided they could not afford the fees.

The young John Keats was described by his friend Edward Holmes as a volatile character, "always in extremes", given to indolence and fighting.

In March 1810, when John Keats was 14, his mother died of tuberculosis, leaving the children in their grandmother's custody.

John Keats appointed two guardians, Richard Abbey and John Sandell, for them.

That autumn, John Keats left Clarke's school to be an apprentice with Thomas Hammond, a surgeon and apothecary who was a neighbour and the doctor of the Jennings family.

John Keats lodged in the attic above the surgery, at 7 Church Street, until 1813.

From 1814 John Keats had two bequests, held in trust for him until his 21st birthday.

In October 1815, having finished his 5 year apprenticeship with Hammond, John Keats registered as a medical student at Guy's Hospital and began studying there.

John Keats lodged near the hospital, at 28 St Thomas's Street in Southwark, with other medical students, including Henry Stephens who gained fame as an inventor and ink magnate.

John Keats's training took up increasing amounts of his writing time and he became increasingly ambivalent about it.

John Keats had written his first extant poem, "An Imitation of Spenser," in 1814, when he was 19.

That summer, John Keats went with Clarke to the seaside town of Margate to write.

John Keats immediately changed publishers to Taylor and Hessey in Fleet Street.

Hessey became a steady friend to John Keats and made the company's rooms available for young writers to meet.

John Keats introduced Keats to many prominent men in his circle, including the editor of The Times, Thomas Barnes; the writer Charles Lamb; the conductor Vincent Novello; and the poet John Hamilton Reynolds, who would become a close friend.

John Keats met regularly with William Hazlitt, a powerful literary figure of the day.

In early December 1816, under the heady influence of his artistic friends, John Keats told Abbey he had decided to give up medicine in favour of poetry, to Abbey's fury.

John Keats had spent a great deal on his medical training, and despite his state of financial hardship and indebtedness, made large loans to friends such as the painter Benjamin Haydon.

On 11 April 1818, John Keats reported that he and Coleridge had taken a long walk on Hampstead Heath.

In June 1818, John Keats began a walking tour of Scotland, Ireland and the Lake District with Charles Armitage Brown.

John Keats moved to the newly built Wentworth Place, owned by his friend Charles Armitage Brown.

John Keats had been inspired by a series of recent lectures by Hazlitt on English poets and poetic identity and had met Wordsworth.

John 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.

The final volume John Keats lived to see, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems, was eventually published in July 1820.

John Keats befriended Isabella Jones in May 1817, while on holiday in the village of Bo Peep, near Hastings.

John Keats is described as beautiful, talented and widely read, not of the top flight of society yet financially secure, an enigmatic figure who would become a part of Keats's circle.

Letters and drafts of poems suggest that John Keats first met Frances Brawne between September and November 1818.

John Keats was born in the hamlet of West End, on 9 August 1800.

John Keats shared her first name with both Keats's sister and mother, and had a talent for dress-making and languages as well as a natural theatrical bent.

John Keats began to lend Brawne books, such as Dante's Inferno, and they would read together.

John Keats gave her the love sonnet "Bright Star" as a declaration.

John Keats endured great conflict knowing his expectations as a struggling poet in increasingly hard straits would preclude marriage to Brawne.

In September 1820 John Keats left for Rome knowing he would probably never see Brawne again.

John Keats lost large amounts of blood and was bled further by the attending physician.

John Keats bled the poet: a standard treatment of the day, but likely a significant contributor to Keats's weakness.

John Keats tried to get the bottle from Severn on the voyage but Severn wouldn't let him have it.

John Keats's body was buried in the city's Protestant Cemetery.

Clark saw to a planting of daisies on the grave, saying John Keats would have wished it.

When John Keats died at 25, he had been writing poetry seriously for only about six years, from 1814 until the summer of 1820, and publishing for only four.

John Keats was convinced that he had made no mark in his lifetime.

John Keats's 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 than any poet who had come before him: "loading every rift with ore".

Seven weeks after the funeral he wrote Adonais, a despairing elegy, stating that John Keats's early death was a personal and public tragedy:.

John Keats came to echo these sentiments in his work, identifying himself with a "new school" for a time, somewhat alienating him from Wordsworth, Coleridge and Byron and providing a basis for scathing attacks from Blackwood's and the Quarterly Review.

The Victorian sense of poetry as the work of indulgence and luxuriant fancy offered a schema into which John Keats was posthumously fitted.

John Keats's work had the full support of the influential Cambridge Apostles, whose members included the young Tennyson, later a popular Poet Laureate who came to regard Keats as the greatest poet of the 19th century.

The largest collection of the letters, manuscripts, and other papers of John Keats is in the Houghton Library at Harvard University.

None of John Keats's biographies were written by people who had known him.

In 2007 a sculpture of John Keats seated on bench, by sculptor Stuart Williamson, at Guys and Saint Thomas' Hospital, London, was unveiled by the Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion.

John Keats reflected on the background and composition of his poetry.