John Keats, Physician and Poet

Abstract

Readers do not generally realize how short the writing life of J John-Keats actually was. It is well known, of course, that he died of tuberculosis when only a few months more than twenty-five years old; but the extent of his works, as large as that of most poets with a normal age span, might suggest that he began, like his contemporaries Shelley and Byron, at some precociously early age. This is far from true. The ranks of Keats's poems are notably not swelled by juvenilia, and for a very simple reason. On well-attested authority, he did not write a line of original English verse until probably the spring of 1813, shortly after his eighteenth birthday. How comparatively late this was for the first utterance of a major English poet may be seen by reflecting that, at almost this exact moment, Alfred Tennyson, the major poet of the next generation, was