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Don't be discouraged by a failure. It can be a
positive experience. Failure is, in a sense,
the highway to success, inasmuch as every
discovery of what is false leads us to seek
earnestly after what is true, and every
fresh experience points out some.
~John Keats~

 John Keats, an English poet, was born on October 31, 1795 in Finsbury Pavement near London. Several of his poems and sonnets are published in different works, but some of his personal letters are among the best written by any English poet. Keats wrote about the inspiration for living and writing in his letters. He wrote letters to his brothers, his sister, close friends, and Fanny Brawne, his fiancé. The letters he wrote help us picture his integrity and his character. He often wrote about his thoughts on poetry. Keats' letters explain his many works, but they are also interesting enough to read without reading his poetry.

John Keats' parents were Thomas Keats and Francis Jennings. When his father Thomas was twenty, he was in charge of the stables kept by a Mr. John Jennings in Finsbury. Thomas married Mr. John Jennings' daughter, Francis. After Mr. John Jennings retired from his business, he left it to Thomas Keats. John Keats was the oldest of Thomas and Francis' five children. Their second son George was born on February 28, 1797. Their third son Tom was born on November 18, 1799. Edward was born on April 28, 1801, but he died in infancy. And their only daughter Francis Mary was born on June 3, 1803. Thomas Keats was known as a man of intelligence and conduct, two characteristics which were passed on to John.

John Keats lived a happy childhood until he was eight. That's when his father died from a fractured skull after he was thrown off of a horse. His mother remarried that same year, and not long after that she left her new husband and took her children to her mother's. John attended a good school in London where he learned about literature. When John Keats was only fifteen, his mother died of consumption, so the children were left in the care of their grandmother. Their grandmother put them under the care of two guardians, whom she gave money for the benefit of the children. When the guardians had John, they took him away from school to be an apprentice to a surgeon. Before John completed his apprenticeship in 1810, he had a fight with his master and left the school to work at a hospital. John's friend Cowden Clarke encouraged him to devote himself to literature. So in 1814, Keats gave up his life as a medical surgeon and became a poet.

Some of the poets that John Keats got to know were Leigh Hunt, Percy B. Shelley, and Benjamin Robert Haydon. Hunt helped him publish his first poem in a magazine in May of 1816. Keats published about thirty poems and sonnets in the volume "Poems" about a year later.

When Keats received negative feedback, he traveled to the Isle of Wight in spring of 1817. John Keats and his friend Benjamin Bailey later went to Oxford. That winter George, John Keats' brother, married and came to America. He left Tom, who was suffering with consumption, in the care of John. Aside from caring for Tom, John also worked on his poem "Endymion." Just before it was published, Keats and his friend Charles Brown went on a hiking tour to Scotland and Ireland. It was at this time that his first signs of tuberculosis started to show. Keats had to leave the tour and go back to his sick brother Tom in London. When Keats returned, he was criticized for both "Poems" and "Endymion." John Keats continued writing despite the criticism, and he also cared for Tom. John Keats nursed Tom through his last illness in the autumn of 1818.

Around that same time, Keats moved to Hampstead Heath, where he lived in Charles Brown's house. While Brown and Keats were in Scotland, Brown had lent his house to a Mrs. Brawne and her sixteen-year-old daughter Fanny. Mrs. Brawne and Fanny were still living in London when Keats was there, so he soon made their acquaintance. He fell in love with Fanny. The relationship Keats had with Fanny changed his life. She was a kind and generous woman of great character, and she invested much of that in Keats. He was not able to have a normal relationship with Fanny because of his ailing health and the fact that he didn't possess much, and he didn't have a normal job. Keats was so in love with Fanny that he exhausted himself mentally and in autumn of 1819, he tried to give up writing and get a normal job. Tom Keats died in 1818. After Tom died, John Keats moved into Wentworth Place with Charles Brown. In April 1819, Fanny Brawne and Mrs. Brawne became his neighbors. Keats and Fanny were engaged around October of that same year.

Keats gave up hope of living a normal life when a sign of consumption was found in February of 1820. He gave up his future plans and decided his life was over. He wasn't able to enjoy the publication of the volume "Lamia, Isabella &c." which included some of his most popular works. In summer of 1820, Keats' doctors ordered him to move to Italy to avoid the English winter. John Keats traveled with his friend Joseph Severn. They first went to Naples, then to Rome. Keats started getting better, but eventually his health failed again. Keats died in Rome on February 23, 1821, at the young age of twenty-five. He was buried on a Protestant Cemetery. By his request, the lines "Here lies one whose name was writ in water" were engraved on his tombstone.

Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and
not by singularity -- it should strike the
reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts,
and appear almost a remembrance.
~John Keats~

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