The Works of John Keats [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION The romantic mythology surrounding John Keats' short life and pitiful death tends to invest his work with an aura of sanctity, and modify the new, or unaccustomed, reader's response. His poverty, his difficult love for Fanny Brawne (whom he described on first meeting her as 'beautiful and elegant, graceful, silly, fashionable and strange'), and that death in Rome, watched over and recorded by his friend, the painter Joseph Severn, are facts which many of us know vaguely. We may even believe, as many did, that his death was hastened by virulent critical attacks on Endymion. "Tis strange,' wrote Byron with pitying facetiousness, 'the mind, that fiery particle,/Should let itself by snuffd out by an article'. But, as so often, the life was more ambiguous and complex than the legend. Though wounded by these attacks, Keats continued to write with growing assurance, and prophesied accurately soon afterwards, in a letter to his brother George, 'I think I shall be among the English poets after my death'. Keats was born in 1795, the son of a prosperous livery stable manager of Edmonton near London. But after his father's death in 1804 and then that of his mother, he and his much-loved younger brothers and sister came under the care of a strict guardian who was later to keep the sister and her poet brother apart. His education, however, was good, and in 1810 he was apprenticed to an apothecary-surgeon. He was licensed to practise in 1816, but shortly afterwards gave up employment at Guy's Hospital to devote himself to writing. Encouraged by Leigh Hunt, who had published some of his early work, including the astonished and astonishing 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer', he brought out his first volume of poetry in March 1817. Though there were some favourable reviews, Blackwood's mounted a savage attack on his 'Cockney' style. ('Cockney' then meant vulgarly pretentious.) Soon afterwards he met Wordsworth and Lamb, and travelled extensively in the British Isles, and, eariy in 1818, published his sprawling and luxuriant Endymion, which that autumn met with blistering attacks from Blackwood's and The Quarterly Review. And now he lost both his brothers: