John Keats
From Philosopedia
Keats, John (1795—1821)
In his twenties, Keats decided against becoming a surgeon and became one of England’s leading poets. The critics attacked his Endymion (1818), but his poems and sonnets are now considered consummate examples of romanticism. These include “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and the unfinished “Hyperion.” Keats emphatically rejected Christianity, which in an 1816 work he said is “dying like an outburnt lamp.”
- Written in Disgust of Vulgar Superstition
- The church bells toll a melancholy round,
- Calling the people to some other prayers,
- Some other gloominess, more dreadful cares,
- More Hearkening to the sermon’s horrid sound.
- Surely the mind of man is closely bound
- In some black spell; seeing that each one tears
- Himself from fireside joys, and Lydian airs,
- And converse high of those with glory crown’d.
- Still, still they toll, and I should feel a damp—
- A chill as from a tomb, did I not know
- That they are going like an outburnt lamp;
- That ‘tis their sighing, wailing 'ere they go
- Into oblivion;—that fresh flowers will grow,
- And many glories of immortal stamp.
The details of his death at such a young age are not widely known. In February 1820, he had entered his lodgings in Wentworth Place, staggering like a drunk. His friend, Charles Brown, heard Keats cough and say, “Bring me the candle, Brown, and let me see the blood.” With his background in medicine, he looked at the blood for a moment, then said, “I know the color of that blood; it is arterial blood. I cannot be deceived in that color. That drop of blood is my death warrant. I must die.” His diagnosis of tuberculosis was correct, and “he was to die the same slow and painful death he had witnessed his brother endure only a year before,” Scott Slater and Alec Solomita have noted. He recovered somewhat but had relapses, suffering intermittently, they added, “from delusions of persecution—on the one hand, blaming his illness on literary critics and on the other, blaming Fanny Brawne, for not sleeping with him.” Agreeing to go to Italy with a friend, painter Joseph Severn, Keats threatened suicide several times but became better by the time they reached Rome.
New York City's Public Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street contains a copy of an August 1820 letter that Keats wrote to Brawne, one that starts, "My dearest girl," and continues,
- I am glad there is such a thing as the grave. The world is too brutal for me.
It ends,
- I wish that I was either in your arms full of faith or that a thuderbolt would strike me.
Adam Kirsch's informative review about Keats's obsession with fame and death tells that in one of the poet's last letters home, he wrote, "Is there another Life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream?" He decided, "There must be. We cannot be created for this sort of suffering."
Several weeks before he died at the age of twenty-six, Keats told Severn he wanted no name engraved on his gravestone. He simply wanted the words, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” On December 10th, upon suffering a hemorrhage, Keats staggered about his room crying, “This day shall be my last!” Severn previously had hidden all vehicles of self-destruction (knives, forks, drugs), and Keats was unable to kill himself. But every time the physician came Keats would ask, “How long is this posthumous life of mine to last?” On February 24th, Severn heard Keats calling out, “Lift me up for I am dying—I shall die easy—don’t be frightened—thank God it has come.” Severn then held Keats in his arms, their hands clasped for the next seven hours. After breaking out into a sweat, Keats whispered, “Don’t breathe on me—it comes like ice.” He then died very quietly. W. Sharp, who knew him well, said Keats, who did not believe in God and used the word only in a figurative sense, also had no belief in a future life. Like Shelley and Byron, Keats was not buried in England but near the pyramid of Cestius in Rome’s old Protestant cemetery. Severn failed to follow the Keats request for a simple gravestone, choosing instead, “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 engraved on his tomb stone: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.’ ” The Keats name is not on the gravestone, but it is found on the adjacent Severn gravestone: “devoted friend and death-bed companion of John Keats whom he lived to see numbered among the immortal poets of England.”
- Keats's death mask
- Grave next to that of Joseph Severn
Selected Works
- On First Looking into Chapman's Homer (1816)
- Sleep and Poetry (1816)
- Endymion (poem)|Endymion: A Poetic Romance (1817)
- When I have fears that I may cease to be (1818)
- Hyperion (poem)|Hyperion (1818)
- The Eve of St. Agnes (1819)
- Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art (1819)
- La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad (1819)
- Ode to Psyche (1819)
- Ode to a Nightingale (1819
- Ode on a Grecian Urn (1819)
- Ode on Melancholy (1819)
- Ode on Indolence (1819)
- Lamia and Other Poems (1819)
- To Autumn (1819)
- The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream (1819)
