John Keats

Author Code: EJKX

Virtually self-taught in Latin, history, and French, Keats initially studied medicine and was qualified as a surgeon. However, his love of literature and poetry drew him to a career in writing. His first work, a sonnet, was published in the Examiner in 1816 by his friend William Hazlitt. His publication in 1817, with the help of another friend, Shelley, The Poems of John Keats, was a financial failure. Persevering, Keats published Endymion in 1818, but this also received little acclaim from the critics. In 1819, he wrote La Belle Dame sans Merci and his great odes, To a Nightengale, On a Grecian Urn and To Psyche. At the end of that year he published Hyperion and The Eve of St. Agnes, both of which were praised by the critics. Late in 1820, suffering from tubercuosis, Keats travelled to Rome in search of a more conducive climate, but died there at the beginning of 1821. Other important works include Lamia and Other Poems (1820), Cap and Bells (1819) and On Melancholy (1819).