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Keats John 1795 - 1821 (26)

You are always new, the last of your kisses was ever the sweetest.


QUOTES

Bright Star

Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature’s patient sleepless Eremite,


 John Keats was an English poet, representatives of Romanticism. Born in London on October 31, 1795, he was the oldest of five children; his father, Thomas Kits, was the manager of his father in law inn with travel horses. He fall of a horse and died in 1802 and his mother remarried. John was sent to grow up with his grandmother. After the death of his wealthy grandfather he embroiled in litigation for his heritage with his mother. In 1810 his mother died as well from tuberculosis and their great fortune was eaten by managers. John and his brothers faced financial problems and he had to stop school and work as an apprentice to a surgeon-pharmacist. In 1815 he left his position and began medical-pharmacy studies in London but he stopped after a year to devote himself to poetry. In 1816 he published his first sonnet "O Solitude", and thereafter in his short life, he wrote many poems as the masterpieces: The nice mercilessly, Ode to Melancholy, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode to a Grecian Urn and more.

In 1817 he left London to live quietly in the countryside, working the poem Endymion, a huge allegorical epic based on an ancient Greek myth. The review of this project was damning "Better and wiser to be hungry pharmacist than hungry poet, turn around and go home, sir." was written in a newspaper of the time, but he had confidence in himself and wasn’t discouraged. In 1818 he looked after his brother Tom who had tuberculosis and eventually died; in the countryside met Fanny Brown with whom he had a fierce, romantic, relationship, doomed though, as he could not married her because of his poverty and his poor health. He wrote for her the poem "Bright Star". He was diseased with tuberculosis and in 1820 he returned to London to become a journalist but his health deteriorated to pulmonary hemorrhages. His doctor advised him to go to Italy where the climate could have helped him. With the financial help of his publisher he went to Rome, where he died in February 1821. After his desire, his grave had no name written on it but only the inscription:
"Here lies someone whose name was written in water."