50 Fun Facts About John Keats

To which generation of Romantic poets did Keats belong, alongside Byron and Shelley?

His poems were in print for less than four years before he died at 25.

Of what disease did Keats die at the age of 25?

It was his 'family disease'; his mother and both brothers also died of it.

In which part of London was Keats born in 1795?

His father worked at the Swan and Hoop inn nearby; the Globe pub now occupies the site.

What was Keats's father's job?

He was an ostler and later ran the Swan and Hoop, owned by his father-in-law.

How did Keats's father die in 1804, when the boy was eight?

His mother died six years later, leaving the children in the care of their grandmother.

At whose school in Enfield did Keats develop his love of classics and history?

The headmaster's son, Charles Cowden Clarke, became a key mentor and introduced him to Chapman's translations.

To what trade was the 14-year-old Keats apprenticed after leaving school in 1810?

He lodged in the attic above Thomas Hammond's surgery until 1813.

Where did Keats train as a medical student and dresser from 1815?

A dresser assisted surgeons in operations, roughly a junior house surgeon today.

What qualification did Keats gain in 1816, allowing him to practise medicine?

Before the year was out he told his guardian he had resolved to be a poet instead.

Which sonnet, published in The Examiner in May 1816, was the first Keats poem to appear in print?

Charles Cowden Clarke called it his friend's 'red letter day'.

Which influential poet and editor was Keats introduced to in October 1816 by his old schoolmaster's son?

He was a close friend of Byron and Shelley and championed Keats as part of 'a new school of poetry'.

Which lawyer for Keats's publishers became a devoted collector of 'Keatsiana'?

Andrew Motion likens him to Boswell to Keats's Johnson.

The line 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' concludes which of Keats's odes?

The idea first appeared in a letter to his friend Bailey about the truth of the imagination.

With which friend did Keats take a walking tour of Scotland, Ireland and the Lake District in 1818?

He caught a bad cold on the Isle of Mull that some think let the family disease take hold.

Which of Keats's brothers, whom he nursed through his final illness, died in December 1818?

His brother George had by then emigrated to America.

Keats's 'annus mirabilis' of great poetry unfolded at which house on the edge of Hampstead Heath?

It now houses the Keats House museum, and the garden is still there.

According to his housemate, Keats composed 'Ode to a Nightingale' sitting under what?

Brown said Keats sat there for hours and came back with scraps of paper he stuffed behind the books.

How many of his six great odes did Keats write at his Hampstead home in the spring of 1819?

'To Autumn' followed that September; 'Ode to Psyche' opened the published series.

Keats's long poem Endymion, damned by the critics, was dedicated to which doomed young poet?

Byron quipped that Keats was 'snuffed out by an article' after the reviews of Endymion.

How did Byron sum up the idea that harsh reviews of Endymion killed Keats?

John Wilson Croker's review in the Quarterly Review had been particularly savage.

Which periodical's critic John Gibson Lockhart coined the sneer 'the Cockney School' for Hunt's circle?

He told Keats to go 'back to plasters, pills, and ointment boxes'.

Which of these medievalist poems did Keats write in 1819?

With 'The Eve of St. Agnes' it strongly influenced the later Pre-Raphaelites.

What was the title of the acclaimed final volume Keats lived to see published, in July 1820?

It won favourable notices in the Examiner and the Edinburgh Review.

Which older woman did Keats meet at Bo Peep near Hastings in 1817, an early intimate of his circle?

She may have suggested the themes of 'The Eve of St. Agnes' and was among the first told of his death.

Which young woman who moved into the other half of his Hampstead house in 1819 became the love of Keats's life?

She shared her first name with both Keats's sister and mother.

Which love sonnet did Keats give his fiancée as a declaration, revising it until his last months?

He made his final revisions to it on the ship carrying him to Italy.

On coughing up blood in February 1820, what did Keats call the drop, recognising its colour?

He told Brown, 'I know the colour of that blood... I must die.'

Which friend, a painter, accompanied Keats on his final voyage to Italy in 1820?

He nursed Keats devotedly to the end and is buried beside him in Rome.

Why was Keats's ship held in quarantine for ten days at Naples?

He did not reach Rome until 14 November, too late for any benefit from the warmer climate.

On which famous Roman staircase did Keats spend his last months, in a house now a museum?

The villa is now the Keats–Shelley Memorial House.

What starvation diet did Dr James Clark impose on the dying Keats to reduce blood flow to his stomach?

Clark also bled him, which probably hastened his death.

On what date did Keats die in Rome?

His autopsy showed his lungs almost entirely disintegrated.

Where was Keats buried?

Shelley's ashes were later interred there too.

What words did Keats ask to be carved on his nameless tombstone?

Severn and Brown added lines protesting the critics who they felt had killed him.

Which fellow poet memorialised Keats seven weeks after the funeral in the elegy Adonais?

He blamed Keats's death on the Quarterly Review's attack on Endymion.

Roughly how many copies did Keats's three volumes of poetry sell in his lifetime?

His fame grew rapidly only after his death.

Which Victorian Poet Laureate came to regard Keats as the greatest poet of the 19th century?

The Pre-Raphaelites, including Millais and Rossetti, also drew directly on Keats's poems.

Who published the first full biography of Keats, in 1848, helping place him in the canon?

None of Keats's biographers had actually known him.

Keats's 1819 tragedy Otho the Great was damned by critics and not staged until which year?

It came out of the same astonishing year as the great odes, 'Lamia' and 'The Eve of St. Agnes'.

Which term did Keats coin for the poet's capacity to remain 'in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts'?

He also described the poet as a 'Chameleon Poet' with no fixed identity.

What did Keats call the kind of writer who 'has no self... no Identity' and enjoys both light and shade?

The idea appears in a letter to Woodhouse.

A walk through stubble fields near Winchester in September 1819 inspired which of Keats's poems?

Bate said each generation has found it one of the most nearly perfect poems in English.

Who wrote and directed the 2009 film about Keats's final romance, starring Ben Whishaw as the poet?

It was inspired by Andrew Motion's 1997 biography of Keats.

Which institution holds the largest collection of Keats's letters and manuscripts?

Other collections are at Keats House, the Keats–Shelley House and the Morgan Library.

Which modernist critic called Keats's letters 'the most important ever written by any English poet'?

He found in the letters a blueprint for his own poetic theory.

Reading Chapman's translation of which poet inspired one of Keats's most famous early sonnets?

'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer' followed a night reading it with Charles Cowden Clarke.

In his last year Keats wrote that he was leading what kind of existence?

He repeatedly demanded of Severn, 'How long is this posthumous existence of mine to go on?'

Which of the six great odes opened the published series?

The order in which Keats actually wrote them in spring 1819 is still debated.

Which publishers, ashamed of his 1817 volume Poems, did Keats leave for Taylor and Hessey?

Taylor and Hessey of Fleet Street were far more enthusiastic about his work.

How much did Keats's grandfather John Jennings leave him in a trust the poet apparently never knew about?

The family solicitor William Walton knew of the bequest but seemingly never told him.