His life influenced his works, he embodies the typical romantic poets. He died very young (25 years old).
Life. John Keats born in London in 1795 and died in Rome in 1821. He belongs to a family modest economically and intellectually. His father died when he was a children, and his mother remarried. Most of the members of his family suffer of consumption (was the disease of the century). He looked after his mother with devotion. He hasn't a deep education, at the age of 16 he stopped his classical education. He starts to demonstrate an interest in poetry and he attends a course in the hospital to became apothecary. After that he went as an apprentice in an apothecary, but he never exploited his certificate because he focused in poetry. He felt inspiration for poetry thanks to the influence of Leight Hunt (critic and editor of the magazine Examiner, the first was Defoe) and Robert Haydon (poet).
They led him to the British Museum to contemplate Lord Marbles. Lord Elgin took the real Pantheon of Athens in the British Museum. Here John Keats contemplates and admires the beauty of Art, the classical statues influenced him and led him to the interest of Beauty. The Beauty is the symbol of immortality of Art. One of his brother emigrates to America because of poverty, John Keats and his friend Charles Brown decided to accompany his brother to Manchester to sale, then they go to Scotland. In Scotland John Keats took a serious cold that turned into consumption. Also his brother Tom was cursed by consumption. John Keats wrote a collection of poems Hendimion: a collection of the first period (shepherds fall in love with gods), which was published in the Examiner but it was unsuccessful.
The critic criticize his way of writing (he suffers for it), in fact he was called the cockney poet (cockney is the dialect of mariners). However he continued his work and he published an after work called Hyperion which spoke about the struggle between titans and God. The 1819-1820 are brilliant years for him (annus mirabilis) because he wrote his masterpiece, he produced a great quantity of works because he already known his destiny (died of consumption). He wrote: Ode to a nightingale, Ode on melancholy, Ode to autumn, Ode on a Grecian Urn, La belle dame sans merci. The Odes have a classical romantic style. He fell in love with Fanny Brown but this love story was destined to finish because John Keats was poor and ill. The love letters of John Keats to Fanny are the best ones of Literature.
He was helped economically by his friend Charles Brown, in fact he didn't earn enough with the publication of his works. His health problem increased. All of his friends collected money in order to send him to Italy for the therapy of the sun. They organized a trip to Italy, he set for two months in Naples and then he moved to Rome (close of Spain's place there is the house of John Keats). In a short period he died. The family couldn't afford the expensive cost to transport his corpse to England and to organize the funeral. His tomb is in Rome in the British graveyard: "Here lies whom whose name was written in water".