John Keats
by Walter Jackson Bate
Summary
Walter Jackson Bate's biography follows John Keats from his 1795 birth above his grandfather's inn near Moorgate in London, through his father's death in a riding accident when Keats was eight and his mother's death from tuberculosis six years later, losses that left Keats and his three younger siblings in his grandmother's care. It follows him through his schooling at John Clarke's academy in Enfield, where Charles Cowden Clarke introduced him to Renaissance poetry, and through his medical apprenticeship and training at Guy's Hospital, work Keats abandoned in December 1816, just past his twenty first birthday, when he told his guardian he had resolved to be a poet rather than a surgeon. Bate follows the uneven start of that decision, an 1817 debut collection that drew almost no notice, and then the extraordinary concentration of work Keats produced in 1819, when he wrote five of his six great odes within a matter of weeks at Wentworth Place in Hampstead, the house he shared with his friend Charles Armitage Brown, along with The Eve of St Agnes and Lamia.
Bate gives real weight to Keats's love for Fanny Brawne, who moved in next door in 1819, a relationship the poet's lack of money kept from ever becoming an engagement he felt he could honor, and to the nursing of his brother Tom through the tuberculosis that killed him in December 1818, an exposure that likely infected Keats himself. The biography follows the physical decline that began the next year, the moment in February 1820 when Keats, coughing blood, recognized arterial blood on his own pillow and told Brown he knew what it meant, and his final voyage to Italy that autumn in a doomed search for a warmer climate. It closes with his death in Rome in February 1821, at twenty five, and the gravestone he asked for, naming no name, only a man whose name was writ in water.
Bate, a Harvard scholar who would later write an equally admired biography of Samuel Johnson, builds the book from Keats's own letters, which survive in unusual depth for so short a life, treating them as evidence of a mind maturing at extraordinary speed under the pressure of a body already failing.
Historical Context & Significance
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press published John Keats in 1963, and it won the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. Bate had already established himself as a major literary scholar before the book appeared, and his Keats joined his later biography of Samuel Johnson, which won a second Pulitzer for Bate in 1978, as two life studies that critics have continued to cite as models of literary biography grounded closely in a subject's own letters rather than in secondhand anecdote.
The book helped cement the modern critical consensus around Keats, once dismissed by hostile reviewers during his own lifetime, as one of the major English Romantic poets, It shared the field with a rival life of Keats published the same season, Aileen Ward's John Keats: The Making of a Poet, which took the 1964 National Book Award while Bate's took the Pulitzer and finished as a National Book Award finalist.