Medical training and writing poetry In October 1815, having finished his five-year apprenticeship with Hammond, Keats registered as a medical student at
Guy's Hospital, now part of
King's College London, and began studying there. Within a month, he was accepted as a dresser at the hospital assisting surgeons during operations, the equivalent of a junior house surgeon today. It was a significant promotion, that marked a distinct aptitude for medicine; and it brought greater responsibility and a heavier workload. Keats's training took up increasing amounts of his writing time and he became increasingly ambivalent about it. He felt he was facing a stark choice. He had written his first extant poem, "An Imitation of Spenser", in 1814, when he was 19. Now, strongly drawn by ambition, inspired by fellow poets such as
Leigh Hunt and
Lord Byron, and beleaguered by family financial crises, he suffered periods of depression. His brother George wrote that John "feared that he should never be a poet, & if he was not he would destroy himself." In 1816, Keats received his
apothecary's licence, which made him eligible to practise as an apothecary, physician and surgeon, but before the end of the year he informed his guardian that he resolved to be a poet, not a surgeon. This was the first appearance of Keats's poetry in print;
Charles Cowden Clarke called it his friend's red letter day, first proof that Keats's ambitions were valid. Among his poems of 1816 was
To My Brothers. That summer, Keats went with Clarke to the seaside town of
Margate to write. There he began "Calidore" and initiated an era of great letter writing. On returning to London, he took lodgings at 8 Dean Street, Southwark, and braced himself to study further for membership of the
Royal College of Surgeons. In October 1816 Clarke introduced Keats to the influential Leigh Hunt, a close friend of Byron and Shelley. Five months later came the publication of
Poems, the first volume of Keats's verse, which included "I stood tiptoe" and "Sleep and Poetry", both strongly influenced by Hunt. Unlike the Olliers, Keats's new publishers were enthusiastic about his work. Within a month of the publication of
Poems they were planning a new Keats volume and had paid him an advance. Hessey became a steady friend to Keats and made the company's rooms available for young writers to meet. Their publishing lists came to include
Coleridge,
Hazlitt,
Clare,
Hogg,
Carlyle and
Charles Lamb. Through Taylor and Hessey, Keats met their
Eton-educated lawyer, Richard Woodhouse, who advised them on literary as well as legal matters and was deeply impressed by
Poems. Although he noted that Keats could be "wayward, trembling, easily daunted," Woodhouse was convinced of Keats's genius, a poet to support as he became one of England's greatest writers. Soon after they met, the two became close friends, and Woodhouse started to collect Keatsiana, documenting as much as he could about the poetry. This archive survives as one of the main sources of information on Keats's work. Despite the bad reviews of
Poems, Hunt published the essay "Three Young Poets" (
Shelley, Keats, and
Reynolds) and the sonnet "
On First Looking into Chapman's Homer", foreseeing great things to come. He 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. Keats also met regularly with
William Hazlitt, a powerful literary figure of the day. It was a turning point for Keats, establishing him in the public eye as a figure in what Hunt termed "a new school of poetry". At this time Keats wrote to his friend Bailey, "I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the imagination. What imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth." This passage would eventually be transmuted into the concluding lines of "
Ode on a Grecian Urn": Beauty is truth, truth beauty' – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know". In early December 1816, under the heady influence of his artistic friends, Keats told Abbey he had decided to give up medicine in favour of poetry, to Abbey's fury. 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. Keats would go on to lend £700 to his brother George. By lending so much, Keats could no longer cover the interest of his own debts.
Travelling and ill health Having left his training at the hospital, suffering from a succession of colds, and unhappy with living in damp rooms in London, Keats moved with his brothers into rooms at 1
Well Walk in the village of
Hampstead in April 1817. There John and George nursed their
tubercular brother Tom. The house was close to Hunt and others of his circle in Hampstead, and to
Coleridge, respected elder of the first wave of Romantic poets, then living in
Highgate. On 11 April 1818, Keats reported that he and Coleridge had taken a long walk on
Hampstead Heath. In a letter to his brother George, he wrote that they had talked about "a thousand things, ... nightingales, poetry, poetical sensation, metaphysics." Around this time he was introduced to
Charles Wentworth Dilke and James Rice. In June 1818, Keats began a walking tour of Scotland, Ireland and the
Lake District with
Charles Armitage Brown. Keats's brother George and his wife Georgiana accompanied them to
Lancaster and then continued to
Liverpool, from where they migrated to America, living in
Ohio and
Louisville, Kentucky, until 1841, when George's investments failed. Like Keats's other brother, they both died penniless and racked by tuberculosis, for which there was no effective treatment until the next century. In July, while on the
Isle of Mull, Keats caught a bad cold and "was too thin and fevered to proceed on the journey." After returning south in August, Keats continued to nurse Tom, so exposing himself to infection. Some have suggested this was when tuberculosis, his "family disease", took hold. "
Consumption" was not identified as a disease with a single infectious origin until 1820. There was considerable stigma attached to it, as it was often tied with weakness, repressed sexual passion or masturbation. Keats "refuses to give it a name" in his letters. Tom Keats died on 1 December 1818.
Wentworth Place: annus mirabilis museum (left), Ten Keats Grove (right),
Hampstead Heath, London John Keats moved to the newly built Wentworth Place, owned by his friend Charles Armitage Brown. It was on the edge of
Hampstead Heath, ten minutes' walk south of his old home in Well Walk. The winter of 1818–19, though a difficult period for the poet, marked the beginning of his
annus mirabilis in which he wrote his most mature work. Keats may have seemed to his friends to be living on comfortable means, but in reality he was borrowing regularly from Abbey and his friends. Brown wrote, "In the spring of 1819 a nightingale had built her nest near my house. 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. When he came into the house, I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his hand, and these he was quietly thrusting behind the books. On inquiry, I found those scraps, four or five in number, contained his poetic feelings on the song of our nightingale." Dilke, co-owner of the house, strenuously denied the story, printed in
Richard Monckton Milnes's 1848 biography of Keats, dismissing it as 'pure delusion'. "
Ode on a Grecian Urn" and "
Ode on Melancholy" were inspired by sonnet forms and probably written after "Ode to a Nightingale".
John Gibson Lockhart writing in ''
Blackwood's Magazine, described Endymion'' as "imperturbable drivelling idiocy". With biting sarcasm, Lockhart advised, "It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr John, back to plasters, pills, and ointment boxes." It was Lockhart at
Blackwoods who coined the defamatory term "the
Cockney School" for Hunt and his circle, which included both Hazlitt and Keats. The dismissal was as much political as literary, aimed at upstart young writers deemed uncouth for their lack of education, non-formal rhyming and "low diction". They had not attended
Eton,
Harrow or
Oxbridge and they were not from the upper classes. In 1819 Keats wrote "
The Eve of St. Agnes", "
La Belle Dame sans Merci", "
Hyperion", "
Lamia" and a play,
Otho the Great, critically damned and not performed until 1950. The poems "Fancy" and "Bards of passion and of mirth" were inspired by the garden of Wentworth Place. In September, very short of money and in despair considering taking up journalism or a post as a ship's surgeon, he approached his publishers with a new book of poems. The final volume Keats lived to see published,
Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, was published in July 1820. It received greater acclaim than had
Endymion or
Poems, finding favourable notices in both
The Examiner and
Edinburgh Review. It came to be recognised as one of the most important poetic works ever published.
Isabella Jones and Fanny Brawne, 1817–1820 Keats befriended Isabella Jones in May 1817, while on holiday in the village of
Bo Peep, near
Hastings. She 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. The trysts may have been a sexual initiation for Keats according to Bate and
Robert Gittings. In 1821, Jones was one of the first in England to be notified of Keats's death. It is likely that the 18-year-old Brawne visited the Dilke family at Wentworth Place before she lived there. She was born in the hamlet of West End, now in the district of
West Hampstead, on 9 August 1800. Like Keats's grandfather, her grandfather kept a London inn, and both lost several family members to tuberculosis. She 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. During November 1818 she developed an intimacy with Keats, but it was shadowed by the illness of Tom Keats, whom John was nursing through this period. of Fanny Brawne taken circa 1850 (photograph on glass) On 3 April 1819, Brawne and her widowed mother moved into the other half of Dilke's Wentworth Place, and Keats and Brawne were able to see each other every day. Keats began to lend Brawne books, such as
Dante's
Inferno, and they would read together. He gave her the love sonnet "Bright Star" (perhaps revised for her) as a declaration. It was a work in progress which he continued until the last months of his life, and the poem came to be associated with their relationship. "All his desires were concentrated on Fanny". From this point there is no further documented mention of Isabella Jones. Keats endured great conflict knowing his expectations as a struggling poet in increasingly hard straits would preclude marriage to Brawne. Their love remained unconsummated; jealousy for his 'star' began to gnaw at him. Darkness, disease and depression surrounded him, reflected in poems such as "The Eve of St. Agnes" and "La Belle Dame sans Merci" where love and death both stalk. "I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks;" he wrote to her, "your loveliness, and the hour of my death". It took a month for the news of his death to reach London, after which Brawne stayed in mourning for six years. In 1833, more than 12 years after his death, she married and went on to have three children; she outlived Keats by more than 40 years. ==Last months: Rome, 1820==