John Keats

John Keats was born in London in 1795. Orphaned early, he studied medicine at Guy's Hospital and, in 1816, became one of a new generation of qualified apothecaries. Medicine remained for him a standard of effective action against suffering, but he soon abandoned the profession in order to live for and by his poetry. He published three volumes during his lifetime and, while many of his contemporaries were prompt to recognize his greatness, snobbery and political hostility led the Tory press to vilify and patronize him as a 'Cockney poet'. He died of TB at the age of twenty-five. Financial anxieties and the loss of those he loved most had tried him persistently, yet he dismissed the concept of life as a vale of tears and substituted the concept of a 'vale of Soul-making'. His poetry and his remarkable letters reveal a spirit of questing vitality and profound understanding and his final volume, which contains the great odes and the unfinished Hyperion, attests to an astonishing maturity of power.


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