He was studying medical studies at Guy's Hospital, London. But later on, he abandoned medicine for poetry. He finds melancholy in delight, and pleasure in pain; he feels the highest intensity of love as an approximation to death; he inclines equally towards a life of indolence and "sensation" and toward a life of thought; he is aware both of the attraction of an imaginative dream world without "disagreeables" and the remorseless pressure of the actual; he inspires as the same time for aesthetic detachment and for social responsibility.
Keats's father was head stableman at a London livery stable: he married his employer's daughter and inherited the business. Mrs. Keats, by all reports, was a strongly sensuous woman, and a rather casual but affectionate mother to her five children. John (the first born), his three brothers (one of whom died in infancy), and a sister. Keats was sent to the Reverend John Clarke's private school at Enfield where he was a noisy, high-spirited boy; despite his small stature (when full-grown, he was barely over five feet in height), he distinguished himself in skylarking and fistfights. Here he had the good fortune to have as a teacher Charles Cowden Clarke, son of the headmaster, who later became himself a man of letters; he encouraged Keats's passion for reading and both at school and in the course of their later friendship, introduced him to Spencer and other poets, to music and to the theater.
When Keats was eight, his father was killed by a fall from a horse, and when he was fourteen, his mother died of tuberculosis. Although the livery stable had prospered, and 8000 pounds had been left in trust to the children by Keats's grandmother, the estate remained tied up in the law courts for all of Keats's lifetime. The children's guardian, Richard Abbey, was an unimaginative and practical-minded businessman; he took Keats out of school at the age of fifteen and bound him apprentice to Thomas Hammond, a surgeon and apothecary-surgeon---but almost immediately, over his guardian's protests, he abandoned medicine for poetry.
This decision was influence by Keats's friendship with Leigh Hunt, then editor of the Examiner and a leading political radical, poet, and prolific writer of criticism and periodical essays. Hunt, the first successful author of Keats's acquaintance, added his enthusiastic encouragement of Keats's poetic efforts to that of Clarke. More important, he introduced him to writers greater than Hunt himself, Hazlit, Lamb, and Shelley, as well as to Benjamin Robert Haydon, painter of grandiose historical and religious canvases. Through Hunt Keats also met John Hamilton Reynolds, and then Charles Wentworth Dike and Charles Brown, men who became his intimate friends and provided him with an essential circumstance for a fledgling poet, a sympathetic and appreciative audience. The rapidity and sureness of Keats's development has no match. He did not even undertake poetry until his eighteenth year, and for the next few years produced album verse which was at best merely competent and at times manifested an arch sentimentality.
For even while his health was good, Keats felt a foreboding of early death and applied himself to his art with a desperate urgency. With the year 1818 began a series of disappointments and disasters which culminated in Keats's mortal illness. His younger brother Tom contracted tuberculosis, and the poet in the devoted attendance upon him through the later months of 1818, helplessly watched him waste away until his death that December. In the summer of that year, Keats had taken a walking tour in the English Lake Country, Scotland, and Ireland, and he returned in August with a chronically ulcerated throat made increasingly ominous by the shadow of the tuberculosis which had killed his mother and brother. In the same year, he became engaged to Fanny Brawne, but Keats's dedication to poetry, his poverty, and his growing illness made marriage impossible and love a torment.
In this period of acute distress and emotional turmoil, within five years of his first trying his hand at poetry, Keats achieved the culmination of his brief poetic career. Between January and September of 1819, masterpiece followed masterpiece in astonishing succession: The Eve of St. Agnes, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, all of the "great odes", Lamia, and a sufficient number of fine sonnets to make him, with Wordsworth, the major romantic craftsman in that form. All of these poems possess the distinctive qualities of the work of his maturity: a slow-paced, gracious movement, a concreteness of description in which all the senses-tactile, organic, kinetic, as well as visual and auditory-combine to give the total apprehension of an experience. We find the poet seeming to lose his own identity in the fullness of identification with the object he contemplates which reminded his friends, as it has many critics since, of the language of Shakespeare. And under the richly sensuous surface we find Keats's characteristics presentation of all experience as a tangle of insuperable but irreconcilable opposites. He finds melancholy in delight, and pleasure in pain; he feels the highest intensity of love as an approximation to death; he inclines equally toward a life of indolence and "sensation" and toward a life of thought; he is aware both of the attraction of the an imaginative dream world without "disagreeables" and the remorseless pressure of the actual; he aspires at the same time for aesthetic detachment and for social responsibility.
His letters, no less remarkable than his poetry, reveal him wrestling with the problem of evil and suffering-what to make of our lives in the discovery that "the world is full of misery and heartbreak, pain, sickness and oppression." He was seemingly planning to undertake a new direction and subject matter, when death intervened. He died in Rome on February 23, 1821, and was buried in the protestant cemetery. No one can read Keats's poems and letters without an under sense of the tragic waste of so extraordinary an intellect and genius cut off so early. When he stopped writing at the age of 24, greatly exceeds that at the same age of Chaucer, Shakespeare, or Milton.
Although Keats's career was short and his output small, critics agree that he has a lasting place in the history of English and world literature. Characterized by exact and closely knit construction, sensual description, and by force of imagination, his poetry give transcendental value to the physical beauty of the world.