Context Flashcards
Born
Keats was born in 1795 to a lower-middle-class family in London.
His Parents
When he was still young, he lost both his parents. When Keats was eight his father died from a skull fracture after falling from a horse. Whilst Keats was 14 his mother succumbed to tuberculosis, the disease that eventually killed Keats himself.
Medical Apprenticeship
When he was fifteen, Keats entered into a medical apprenticeship with a surgeon and his training at Guy’s Hospital exposed him to every kind of human suffering. By the time he turned twenty he abandoned his medical training to devote himself to poetry.
His Brother Tom
Keats nursed his brother Tom until he died of tuberculosis in 1818, and was well aware of the symptoms that he experienced in the following four years which preceded his early death.
Fanny Brawne
In Hampstead, he fell in love with a young girl named Fanny Brawne. She developed an intimacy with Keats but this was shadowed by the illness of Tom Keats who John was nursing at this period. Their love became unconsummated due to Keats status as a struggling poet.
Romanticism
Romanticism, a movement that espoused the sanctity of emotion and imagination, and privileged the beauty of the natural world. Many of the ideas and themes evident in Keats’s great odes are quintessentially Romantic concerns: the beauty of nature, the relation between imagination and creativity, the response of the passions to beauty and suffering, and the transience of human life in time. The sumptuous sensory language in which the odes are written, their idealistic concern for beauty and truth, and their expressive agony in the face of death are all Romantic preoccupations—though at the same time, they are all uniquely Keats’s.
Money
Money was always a great concern and difficulty for him as he struggled to stay out of debt. He suffered periods of depression because of family financial crisis.
Critics Reception
His poems were not well received by critics during his lifetime, his reputation grew after his death.
Tuberculosis
Tuberculosis took hold of him and Keats was advised to move to a warmer climate. In September 1820 Keats left for Rome knowing he would never see Brawne again.
