John Keats, an English poet, became known as one of

the premier poets of the English Romantic movement

during the early nineteenth century. Despite his very
short life and constant critical attacks from
periodicals of the day, he has, posthumously, been
very influential on poets such as Alfred Tennyson and
Wilfred Owen. Keats' poetry, characterized by
elaborate word choice and sensual imagery, included
a series of odes that were his masterpieces and which
remain among the most popular poems in English
literature.

John Keats was born in 1795 at 85 Moorgate in

London, England. Keats was baptized at St. Botolph-
without-Bishopsgate and happily lived there for the
first seven years of his life. The trouble began in
1804, when his father died of a fractured skull after
falling from his horse. His mother, Frances Jennings
Keats, quickly remarried but soon left her new
husband and moved herself and her four children into
the home of Alice Jennings, Keats' grandmother. The
school Keats attended there first instilled in him a
love of literature.

In 1810, Keats' world was disrupted once again when

his mother died of tuberculosis, leaving him and his
siblings in the custody of their grandmother who
subsequently appointed two guardians to take care of
her new "charges". They removed Keats from his old
school in order to become a surgeon's apprentice at
Thomas Hammond's apothecary shop in Edmonton. He
left his apprenticeship in 1814, after a fight with his
master, and became a student. During that year, he
devoted increasingly greater amounts of his time to
his real love, the study of literature. During this time
that Keats authored parts of Hyperion and the five-
act poetic tragedy Otho The Great as well asIsabella,
St. Agnes' Eve and Lamia.

His brother, Tom Keats, was entrusted to his care

following the death of their grandmother. Tom was
suffering, as their mother had, from tuberculosis.
Keats left to walk in Scotland and Ireland with his
friend Charles Armitage Brown, having finished his
epic poem, Endymion, but he too began to show signs
of tuberculosis infection, and returned prematurely
from his trip. Upon his return, he found that Tom's
condition had deteriorated, and on February 23,
1821, Tom died of tuberculosis. John Keats moved
again, this time to live in Brown's house in
Hampstead, next to Hampstead Heath. He lived next
door to Fanny Brawne, who lived there with her
mother. He quickly fell in love with Fanny; however,
it was overall an unhappy affair for the poet.

This relationship was cut short quickly when, by

1820, Keats began showing serious signs of
tuberculosis, the disease that had plagued his family.
He left London's cold weather behind and moved to
Italy with his friend Joseph Severn, on the advice of
his doctors. Keats moved into a house, now a
museum dedicated to his life and work known as The
Keats-Shelley House, which is on the Spanish Steps in
Rome, where, despite attentive care from Severn and
Dr. John Clark, the poet's health rapidly
deteriorated.
John Keats died in 1821 and was buried in the
Protestant Cemetery, Rome. His last request was to
be buried under a tombstone reading, "Here lies One
Whose Name were writ in Water." His instructions
were explicit that his name was not to appear on the
stone. Despite these deathbed requests, however,
Severn and Brown also added the epitaph: "This
Grave contains all that was mortal, of a young English
poet, who on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his
heart, at the Malicious Power of his enemies, desired
these words to be Engraven on his Tomb Stone" along
with the image of a lyre with broken strings.