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John Keats, "To Autumn"

BIOGRAPHY

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[From The Norton Introduction to Literature]

(1795–1821)

John Keats was the son of a London livery stable owner and his wife; reviewers would later disparage him as a working class “Cockney poet.” At fifteen he was apprenticed to a surgeon, and at twenty-one he became a licensed pharmacist—in the same year that his first two published poems, including the sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman's Homer,” appeared in The Examiner, a journal edited by the critic and poet Leigh Hunt. Hunt introduced Keats to such literary figures as the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and helped him publish his Poems by John Keats (1817). When his second book, the long poem Endymion (1818), was fiercely attacked by critics, Keats, suffering from a steadily worsening case of tuberculosis, knew that he would not live to realize his poetic promise. In July 1820, he published Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, which contained the poignant “To Autumn” and three great odes: “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode on Melancholy,” and “Ode to a Nightingale”; early the next year, he died in Rome. In the years after Keats's death, his letters became almost as famous as his poetry.

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