John Keats

John Keats: The Making of a Poet (1963) is a biography by Aileen Ward. One of the English Romantics, the biography follows Keats from his childhood, through his education and training as a surgeon, to his untimely death of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-five. Ward focuses specifically on Keats’s development as a poet and “the inner drama of his creative life as it is recorded in his poems and letters.”

Keats’s early years are mostly a mystery. There are few solid facts and a handful of undated poems. However, from accounts by Keats’s contemporaries, he was an intelligent, likable, and charming young man. He had three younger siblings, George, Franny, and Tom. When his father died, Keats’s mother remarried disastrously. By divorcing her second husband, she lost all claim to her property and children. What happens to her next is unclear, but there are indications that she abandoned her children to be raised by their grandparents and took up as another man’s mistress. This incident made Keats more wary of people and love. His mother’s flightiness also influenced the way he thought of women. After her abandonment, he became more rebellious. Despite his small stature, he soon gained a reputation for being the scrappiest fighter at his school. Six years later, his mother reappeared in their lives. She fell ill and died of consumption, harkening another drastic change in his personality. No longer a brawler, he became quiet and serious, absorbed in reading.

At fifteen, he decided to become a doctor and started a medical apprenticeship. It was a sensible career path for the time and would have afforded him a comfortable living, a decision likely influenced by the loss of his mother and uncle to consumption. It was not until Keats turned eighteen and was introduced to Spenser for the first time that he began to turn his attention and interests to poetry. At twenty, he submitted “To Solitude” to The Examiner and was published for the first time. Meanwhile, he studied hard at university, won a competitive position as a dresser (he helped surgeons during operations), and graduated with apothecary credentials before he was twenty-one years old. In other words, he was qualified to act as an apothecary (pharmacist), a doctor, and a surgeon.



Keats made a series of bad financial decisions. Although his family assumed that he would continue to practice medicine and have a comfortable, stable income, Keats decided to pursue writing. He lent money injudiciously to friends and family, including large sums of money to his brother who squandered it in bad investments he could not repay. When he turned twenty-one, he was supposed to inherit a large sum of money from both his mother and his grandfather, but his attorney was unscrupulous and failed to tell the Keats siblings about it. The money would have gone a long way toward securing the young poet whose financial situation became increasingly dire. Moreover, his youngest brother, Tom, was in failing health, displaying early signs of tuberculosis.

At the time, tuberculosis (though it was not yet named as such) was considered a “family disease.” Considering how many relatives Keats lost to it, the renewed specter of the disease in his life gave him a premonitory inkling that he might not live longer than another few years, his life cut short before he could master his poetry. He planed a summer walking trip around Scotland, looking for beauty and inspiration. He kept journals of his experiences, adding at least a page a day for a while, often addressing his musings to his brother Tom. When he returned from his trip, he found Tom’s condition had worsened. Battling his own instinctive fear of the disease and feeling his own mortality creeping up on him, Keats took care of his brother until he died on December 1, 1818.

Keats’s life changed when he met Fanny Brawne in 1818, he but could not give her his full attention until after Tom died, when his interest in her renewed. In his journals, it was love at first sight—an alien feeling of fascination and confusion at once. Although their relationship was difficult at first because Keats was insecure, the two of them fell in love. He wrote some of his most famous poetry around this time: The Eve of St. Agnes, Otho the Great, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” “Chorus of Four Fairies,” “On a Grecian Urn,” “On Melancholy,” and “Ode to Psyche.” He wanted to marry Fanny, but her mother refused the match. Amiable though Mrs. Brawne was, she did not intend to allow her daughter to marry a poor poet without prospects or a steady income. Eventually, she relented and the couple was quietly engaged. The occasionally tumultuous love affair was doomed. His health was slowly declining and a sojourn to the country was not enough to help him recover it. At last, his suspicions and premonitions regarding his health were confirmed when he started coughing up blood. He told his friend, “This is unfortunate. I know the color of that blood. It’s arterial blood. There’s no mistaking that color. That blood is my death warrant. I must die.”



Keats was sent to Italy with his friend Severn as a traveling companion. Keats suffered through more hemorrhages that left him coughing up blood, and his seasickness exacerbated his illness. Being placed in quarantine before they could disembark at the end of October did not help matters. Keats and Severn traveled to Rome. Keats declined and the true awfulness of the disease set in. He tried to kill himself with laudanum, but Severn intervened. Keats suffered multiple hemorrhages, fevers, delirium, and intense hunger because his digestion system had shut down and he was unable to keep anything down. By January, they were out of money and Keats was in the final stages of the disease. He finally died in late February. Death did not come for him easily; for hours, he struggled against drowning in his own blood.

The biography won the National Book Award for Arts and Letters, as well as the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize. Ward quotes extensively from Keats’s journals and letters, as well as his poetry. The book also includes a short portrait gallery of Keats and some of his friends and contemporaries, along with a handwritten draft of a poem and a letter to Fanny.