John Keats was born in 1795 in Moorfields, England, the son of a stableman who married the owner's daughter and eventually inherited the stable for himself. Keats had two brothers, George and Tom and a sister named Fanny. His Father died when John was eight, leaving the family tied up in legal matters that would last the rest of John's life. He was fourteen when his mother died of tuberculosis, and fifteen when his guardian apprenticed him to an apothecary-surgeon. Soon after, John left the medical field to focus primarily on poetry. And the poem that started it all, TO SOLITUDE.

In July 1820, John left England for Italy. Keats had been experiencing ill health and it was thought that the warmer air of Italy would help cure him. John and a friend (Joseph Severn)took up residence in a home next to the famed Spanish Steps in Rome. He died of tuberculosis in the arms of Joseph. S on February 23, 1821, at the age of twenty-six.

Keats was well educated at a school in Enfield, where he began a translation of Virgil's Aeneid. In 1810 he was apprenticed to an apothecary-surgeon. His first attempts at writing poetry date from about 1814, and include an `Imitation' of the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser. In 1815 he left his apprenticeship and became a student at Guy's Hospital, London; one year later, he abandoned the profession of medicine for poetry. Keats's first volume of poems was published in 1817. It attracted some good reviews, but these were followed by the first of several harsh attacks by the influential Blackwood's Magazine. Undeterred, he pressed on with his poem `Endymion', which was published in the spring of the following year. Keats toured the north of England and Scotland in the summer of 1818, returning home to nurse his brother Tom, who was ill with tuberculosis. After Tom's death in December he moved into a friend's house in Hampstead, now known as Keats House. There he met and fell deeply in love with a young neighbour, Fanny Brawne. "During the following year, despite ill health and financial problems, he wrote an astonishing amount of poetry, including `The Eve of St Agnes', `La Belle Dame sans Merci', `Ode to a Nightingale' and `To Autumn'. His second volume of poems appeared in July 1820; soon afterwards, by now very ill with tuberculosis, he set off with a friend to Italy, where he died the following February."

  




   On September 13, 1820, John Keats left England on the advice of his doctor that he could not survive another English winter. Accompanied by his close friend, Joseph Severn, Keats traveled to Rome. Percy Shelley, a fellow poet, invited Keats to live with him in Pisa, but it was just too far for Keats to travel. Keats and Severn stayed in Rome in the building pictured at left. While there, Keats tried to recover peacefully in the warm Mediterranean climate, but his physical condition and mental attitude continued to deteriorate. At 11 P.M., on February 23, 1821, Keats died peacefully in Severn's arms.

     Keats never thought of himself as a great success. Most of his fame did come posthumously, in fact. For this reason, Keats asked that Severn not put his name on his tombstone. It says only these words: