John Keats (October 31, 1795 – February 23, 1821) was one of the principal poets of the English Romantic movement. During his short life, his work was the subject of constant critical attacks, and it was not until much later that the significance of the cultural change which his work both presaged and helped to form was fully appreciated. Keats' poetry is shown by an elaborate use of words and a sensual imagination; he often felt that he was working in the shadow of past poets, and only towards the end of his life was he able to produce his most original and most memorable poems.

Life

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Keats was born in Finsbury Pavement in London, where his father, Thomas Keats, was a hostler. The pub is now called "The John Keats at Moorgate," only a few yards from Moorgate station. Keats lived happily for the first seven years of his life. The beginnings of his troubles occurred in 1804, when his father died from a fractured skull after falling from his horse. His mother, Frances Jennings Keats, remarried soon afterwards, but as quickly left the new husband and moved herself and her four children (a son had died in infancy) to live with Keats' grandmother. There, Keats attended a school that first instilled in him a love of literature. In 1810, however, his mother died of tuberculosis, leaving him and his siblings in the custody of their grandmother.

The grandmother appointed two guardians to take care of her new charges, and these guardians removed Keats from his old school to become a surgeon's apprentice. This continued until 1814, when, after a fight with his master, he left his apprenticeship and became a student at a local hospital. During that year, he devoted more and more of his time to the study of literature. Keats traveled to the Isle of Wight in the spring of 1817, where he spent a week.

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