John Keats

John Keats Brief Biography
John Keats (1795-1821) was an English Romantic era poet. Being the son of a liveryman (one who works in/owns a stable), he was easily middle class, not the sort to have any poetic aspirations during that time. His father died in 1804 in an incident where he fell off of a horse. His mother remarried to another man only two months later. She left her husband soon after however, and died herself in 1810.
Keats’s brother, mother, and good friend all died of tuberculosis. He suspected for some time that he had the disease as well, and in February of 1820 he was diagnosed with having severe hemorrhages in his lungs. He moved to Rome in an attempt to escape the London winter, as well as his inevitable death. Despite this final feeble attempt, he died during the winter of 1821.
Keats’s poems are filled with great sadness, happiness, and awe. The realization that he was most likely going to die an early death is the most probable reason for this, especially considering that he did not begin writing until only about three and a half years before his death. The years before his death actually turned out to be some of the most eventful of his life. His brother George married and moved to America; in the summer he went on a walking tour of the Lake district in England and also of Scotland with his friend Charles Brown; he met Fanny Brawne, the great love of his life, in the fall, while at the same time nursing his brother Tom, who died in December. The well-known English professor Jack Stillinger once said about Keats’s work, “it is this combined experience of suffering, death, and love all at once, against a background of serious conversation, reading, and thinking that accounts for Keats's sudden rise to excellence in his poetry.”
“To Autumn”SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness, | |
  Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; | |
Conspiring with him how to load and bless | |
  With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; |...