John KeatsArticle Free Pass John Keats, (born October 31, 1795,
London, England—died February 23, 1821, Rome, Papal States
[Italy]), English Romantic lyric poet who devoted his short life
to the perfection of a poetry marked by vivid imagery, great
sensuous appeal, and an attempt to express a philosophy through
classical legend. The son of a livery-stable manager, John Keats
received relatively little formal education. His father died in
1804, and his mother remarried almost immediately. Throughout
his life Keats had close emotional ties to his sister, Fanny,
and his two brothers, George and Tom. After the breakup of their
mother’s second marriage, the Keats children lived with their
widowed grandmother at Edmonton, Middlesex. John attended a
school at Enfield, two miles away, that was run by John Clarke,
whose son Charles Cowden Clarke did much to encourage Keats’s
literary aspirations. At school Keats was noted as a pugnacious
lad and was decidedly “not literary,” but in 1809 he began to
read voraciously. A