John KeatsMiss Latter

Why should you care about John Keats?

• Wordsworth described good poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of

powerful feelings.”

• John Keats was extraordinarily sensitive to the ambivalences of human

experience – the intensity of pleasure and pain, the destructiveness of love,

the longing for death.

• Keats only lived for 25 years, but in that time managed to produce an array of

sensual poems that have reverberated across literature and popular culture.

FUN FACT! Keats was friends with Wordsworth and Shelley, the renowned Romantic poets. Imagine their conversations at dinner parties!

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John Keats

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Hometown: North London

Relationship Status: It’s complicated with Fanny Brawne

Employer: Thomas Hammond

Education: Enfield Academy

Religion: Unconcerned

People Who Inspire Me: John Clarke, ShakespeareFavorite Quotations Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas, ease after war, death after life does greatly please. – Edmund

SpenserFavorite Books: The Faerie Queen - Spenser

Activities: Daily walks in Winchester, six week walking tour in Scotland with mates

Critics: A ‘middle class interloper’

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Friends

1795 - Born1803 – begins

Education at Enfield1804 – father trampled

by a horse

1805 –mother deserts family, lawsuit over

grandfather’s money

1809 – mother returns. 1810 - mother dies of

tuberculosis

Left school at 16 to become a surgeon

Wrote his first poems in 1814

1816 – abandoned the apprenticeship to write

poetry

1817 – first volume published

1818 – beloved brother Thomas dies of

tuberculosis, other brother George

emigrates to America

1819 –meets, engaged to Fanny Brawne,

contracts tuberculosis

Ventures off to Italy on Doctor’s orders

1821 – death. He has become the epitome of

the young, beautiful, doomed poet.

Pivotal Events in Keats’ Life

Some of the topics he wrote about• Nature• Departures• The Ancient World• The inevitability of death• The contemplation of beauty• The fear of not being remembered

Fanny Brawne• 1818, Tom dies. Keats moved to his friend Charles

Brown's house in Hampstead.

• Meets and falls deeply in love with neighbour Fanny

Brawne (18yrs).

• He wrote one of his more famous sonnets to her titled

"Bright Star” and a series of love letters

• While their relationship was a spiritual one, it also

proved to be tempestuous, filled with the highs and lows

from jealousy and infatuation of first love.

• This was the beginning of Keats' most creative period.

He wrote, among others, 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci',

'Ode to a Nightingale' and 'To Autumn’.

H/W

• Find a quote you particularly like from either Keats’ love

letters or poetry.

• Print out your quote and bring it next lesson so that we can

stick it up on the wall.

Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced.