John Keats, poetry, and the romance of a short life -

On burning brightly and finding artistic validation in death

It’s time to revel in some early 19th century English romance with the poster boy of tragedy and posthumous artistic validation. 

John Keats, the bright star, was the very personification of a young romantic. He was everything the poet stereotype brings to your mind: boyish, indulgent, fragile, star-crossed, and exceptionally talented.

And perhaps there’s a close association because Keats is so widely regarded as one of the greatest poets of all time. His work and, quite frankly, his tragic death, have influenced so many of poetry’s powerhouse writers, like T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, Lord Alfred Tennyson, and as we learned in an earlier episode, Oscar Wilde.

So why exactly is Keats such a well-loved literary hero? To answer that, we have to travel back to 18th Century Great Britain.

In the middle of London and in the midst of war

John Keats was born in London on Halloween in 1795. At that time, London was in the middle of the First Industrial Revolution and, subsequently, in the early stages of an insane population boom. 

When Keats was born, the city was home to three quarters of a million people. Its paved roads and sewer systems were brand new. More and more factories were popping up. The city was starting to take shape as an urban metropolis. By the time Keats died, London’s population had doubled. By the mid 19th century, the population had exploded to 3 million people.

You can imagine the strain that influx of people had on London’s resources. In the same year Keats was born, women were actually going to prison for rioting over food. 

But what I believe is the most remarkable thing about this time period is that John Keats was born into revolution and war. 

Just a few years before his birth, America had declared independence and George Washington became its first president, the French Revolution began and King Louis XVI lost his head, and England became entangled in a long series of wars with France. In fact, England was fighting with France for almost all of Keats’s life. Napoleon, yeah that asshole, wasn’t defeated at Waterloo until Keats was 20 years old.

A difficult childhood

But lets go back to October 31, 1795, when our tragic hero was born. Keats was the oldest of five children. His father Thomas Keats worked as a groom in a horse stable that was owned by the Jennings family. Thomas, who was 31 at the time, and the young Frances Jennings, who was 19, were married in 1794. John was born just a year later. He had three younger brothers, George, Thomas, and Edward. Edward unfortunately died when he was a baby. John’s youngest sibling, his sister Franny, was born when he was eight years old.

The family was not wealthy by any means, but they lived a pretty comfortable life. They had enough money to send Keats and his younger brother to school. John and George were sent to a school in Enfield, which was about 15 miles north of London and close to their grandparents home. 

A year after starting school, their father was on the way back from visiting the boys and was thrown from his horse. He died from a skull fracture. His father’s death sent John’s life into turmoil. 

John’s mother remarried just two month’s after her first husband’s death. That second marriage ended almost as abruptly as it began and the Keats children were sent to live with their grandmother. John was just ten years old when his mother disappeared. These traumatic events pushed John into bouts of depression and extreme anxiety. 

At school, he was a fighter and a troublemaker. Keats’s childhood character was described as “always in extremes.” He befriended the headmaster’s son, Charles Cowden Clarke, who remained a lifelong mentor and comrade. He helped Keats in many ways throughout his short life and Clarke was even credited with intr