50 Fun Facts About John Keats

Keats is counted among which generation of English Romantic poets?

The second generation were still children when the first launched the movement in 1798, yet its three leading poets all died young, years before the elders they had followed.

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

Tuberculosis had already killed his mother and a brother. Roman law treated it as contagious, so after he died the furniture in his room was burned.

Which words complete the famous opening line of Keats's Endymion, 'A thing of beauty is…'?

'A joy for ever' was an afterthought: a fellow medical student recalled Keats first trying 'a constant joy' on him, then rewriting the line when he seemed unconvinced.

What was Keats's father's job?

Ostler at a livery stable: Keats's father worked at the Swan and Hoop in London, married the owner's daughter and ended up managing the business himself.

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

A fall from his horse on a late ride home fractured his skull, and he died the next morning. Their mother died six years later, leaving the four children to a grandmother.

F. Scott Fitzgerald took the title of which of his novels from a line in one of Keats's odes?

Tender Is the Night borrows a phrase from 'Ode to a Nightingale', and Fitzgerald printed the lines as the novel's epigraph: 'Already with thee! tender is the night'.

In Keats's poem Isabella, the heroine hides her murdered lover's head in a pot of which herb?

Basil: she tends the pot obsessively while she wastes away. Keats took the grisly story from Boccaccio's Decameron, and the Pre-Raphaelites later painted the scene more than once.

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

Guy's Hospital saw his last operation, the opening of a man's temporal artery. He did it neatly, he told a friend, but his own dexterity seemed a miracle and he never took up the lancet again.

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

An apothecary's licence came in July 1816, after years of training. He never used it: within months he told his guardian that he meant to be a poet instead.

Keats's 1816 sonnet has 'stout Cortez' first sighting the Pacific from Darien; which explorer really did that in 1513?

Vasco Núñez de Balboa saw the ocean from a peak in Panama, then marched down to the shore days later and claimed the whole sea for Spain. Keats's line kept Cortez all the same.

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

Leigh Hunt was a hero to the young Keats: he had served two years in prison for mocking the Prince Regent in his newspaper, which he went on editing from his cell.

Keats's unfinished epic Hyperion follows which race of Greek gods after their defeat by the Olympians?

The Titans, led by the dethroned Saturn, brood on their fall. Keats abandoned the poem in its third book because, he said, it had 'too many Miltonic inversions'.

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

'Ode on a Grecian Urn' describes no one real vase: Keats blended scenes from several, among them a marble urn in the Louvre whose engraving he traced by hand.

On his 1818 walking tour with Charles Brown, Keats struggled through mist to the summit of which mountain?

Ben Nevis nearly finished him: he had walked more than 600 miles with a worsening sore throat, and days later a doctor in Inverness ordered him to abandon the tour.

Which of his brothers did Keats nurse through a last illness that ended in December 1818?

Tom was nineteen. Keats came home from his northern walking tour that August to find him far worse, and stayed at his bedside in their Hampstead lodgings until the end.

Keats wrote most of his great odes in 1819 while lodging in which house, now a museum to him?

Wentworth Place was really a pair of semi-detached houses, and Keats lodged in a friend's half. Later owners renamed it and knocked the two into a single house.

According to his housemate, where did Keats write 'Ode to a Nightingale'?

Under a plum tree in the garden: he carried a chair out, came back a few hours later with scraps of paper and quietly tucked them behind some books.

Keats's poem Lamia opens with the god Hermes freeing its heroine from the body of which creature?

A serpent: made a woman again, she wins a young man of Corinth, but at their wedding feast a philosopher recognises her and calls her by name, and she vanishes with a scream.

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

Thomas Chatterton died of arsenic in a London garret at seventeen, penniless and unrecognised. The Romantic poets mourned him as a lost genius, and Keats inscribed the poem to his memory.

Which poet joked in verse that Keats had been 'snuffed out by an article' after savage reviews of Endymion?

Lord Byron rhymed it in Don Juan with 'that very fiery particle', the mind. The legend stuck, though Keats had in fact met the reviews calmly and gone on writing.

Which periodical coined the sneer 'the Cockney School' for Keats and his London friends?

Blackwood's Magazine ran the attacks under the signature 'Z'. One of them dismissed Endymion as 'imperturbable drivelling idiocy'.

Which medieval-style ballad did Keats write in 1819?

'La Belle Dame sans Merci' borrowed its title from a French court poem four centuries older, and its doomed knight became a favourite subject of the Pre-Raphaelite painters.

After shaking Keats's hand in a lane near Highgate, which older poet said, 'There is death in that hand'?

Samuel Taylor Coleridge recalled a meeting of a minute or so. Keats's own letter describes walking nearly two miles beside him while he talked of nightingales, dreams and 'a thousand things'.

In the folk belief behind Keats's 'The Eve of St. Agnes', a girl who goes supperless to bed dreams of whom?

Her future husband, or so the old wives tell Madeline. Her lover hides in her bedroom to make the dream come true, and the pair slip out of the castle that same night.

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

Fanny Brawne kept his anguished love letters for the rest of her life. They were published only after her death, and many readers of the day were appalled to see them in print.

Which love sonnet did Keats copy into a volume of Shakespeare's poems on the ship taking him to Italy?

'Bright Star' was written out on a blank page facing 'A Lover's Complaint'. His travelling companion took it for the last poem Keats ever wrote, but a draft survives from more than a year earlier.

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

'My death warrant' was a trained medic's verdict. He asked for a candle, studied the single drop on the sheet and told his friend calmly that it was arterial blood, so he must die.

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

Joseph Severn had won the Royal Academy's gold medal months earlier, yet his prospects in London still looked thin, and when a friend urged him to go with Keats he agreed at once.

In which Italian port was the ship carrying the dying Keats held in quarantine for ten days in 1820?

Naples kept the passengers shut in a cramped cabin offshore. Keats said later that in that one week he had made more puns, out of a sort of desperation, than in any year of his life.

Keats spent his last months in a house beside which Roman landmark, now a museum in his memory?

The Spanish Steps rise right beside the house at 26 Piazza di Spagna. His doctor, who worked on the same square, had taken the rooms for him before he reached the city.

James Clark, the doctor who put the dying Keats on an anchovy a day, later became physician to which monarch?

Queen Victoria appointed him on her accession and made him a baronet within months. In Rome he had first blamed Keats's illness on his stomach, and bled him as well as starving him.

At a famous 1817 dinner, Keats agreed that which scientist had 'destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow'?

Isaac Newton had reduced the rainbow to prismatic colours, Charles Lamb complained at the table, and the company drank to 'Newton's health, and confusion to mathematics'. Keats revived the grievance in Lamia.

Keats's gravestone in Rome is carved with which instrument?

A lyre with missing strings sits above the epitaph. Before he died he had the burial ground described to him, and was glad to hear of the violets that grew among the graves.

Keats asked for a gravestone with no name, only the words 'Here lies One whose Name was writ in…' what?

Water: the phrase echoes a Jacobean play, 'all your better deeds shall be in water writ'. His friends added an angry preface about his enemies above it, which they later regretted.

Which fellow poet mourned Keats in the elegy Adonais?

Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned off the Italian coast a year after writing it. When his body washed ashore, a volume of Keats's poems was found in his jacket pocket.

Keats's brother George emigrated to Kentucky and lost much of his money in a steamboat venture with which naturalist?

John James Audubon had the newly arrived couple to stay at his Kentucky home. The boat failed at once, and George, sure he had been cheated, had to write to his brother for money.

Which Poet Laureate said that Keats, 'if he had lived', would have been 'the greatest of us'?

Alfred Tennyson had backed Keats early: as a Cambridge student he belonged to the circle that championed the then neglected poet, and his own lush imagery shows the debt.

In the Greek myth behind Keats's Endymion, the sleeping shepherd is loved by the goddess of what?

The moon: Keats calls her Cynthia, and sends his hero under the earth, beneath the sea and through the air before the pair are united, in a poem of some 4,000 lines.

On his 1818 walking tour, Keats made a pilgrimage to the cottage where which poet was born?

Robert Burns's birthplace let him down: its old keeper, who had known the poet, bored Keats with anecdotes until, he complained, 'the flat dog made me write a flat sonnet'.

Which term did Keats coin for a poet's quality of remaining 'in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts'?

Negative capability struck him during a long discussion with a friend, he told his brothers in a letter of December 1817; Shakespeare, he wrote, possessed it 'so enormously'.

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

The 'Chameleon Poet' takes 'as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen', he explained, which is why a poet struck him as 'the most unpoetical of anything in existence'.

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

'To Autumn' began with the look of the cut cornfields. 'A stubble plain looks warm, in the same way that some pictures look warm,' he told a friend, and it struck him so much that he 'composed upon it'.

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

Jane Campion built her script on Andrew Motion's biography of the poet and hired Motion himself as a consultant; many of the film's lines are lifted straight from Keats's letters.

The world's largest collection of Keats's manuscripts and letters is held at which American university?

Harvard owes it mostly to gifts, above all that of the poet Amy Lowell, a devoted collector and biographer of Keats who left her hoard of his manuscripts to the university in 1925.

Which modernist critic praised Keats's letters as 'what letters ought to be'?

T. S. Eliot loved how in them 'the fine things come in unexpectedly', and held that Keats's remarks on poetry were true of greater and more mature poetry than any he lived to write.

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

Homer kept Keats and a friend up until daylight, reading a borrowed copy aloud. Keats walked home at dawn, and by ten o'clock the finished sonnet lay on his friend's breakfast table.

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

A posthumous existence was his phrase for it in his last known letter. In Rome he kept asking his doctor when this 'posthumous life' of his would come to an end.

Which of Keats's great odes of 1819 is generally thought to have been written first?

'Ode to Psyche' went to his brother that spring as 'the first and the only one with which I have taken even moderate pains'; the rest of his lines, he confessed, he had mostly dashed off in a hurry.

Which sculptures did the painter Haydon take Keats to see in 1817, moving him to write two sonnets?

The Elgin Marbles left him feeling, as one sonnet says, 'like a sick eagle looking at the sky'. His guide had spent years fighting to have the battered Parthenon carvings accepted as masterpieces.

In January 1818 Keats wrote a sonnet about sitting down to reread which Shakespeare tragedy?

King Lear 'appeared to demand the prologue of a sonnet', he told his brothers, so he wrote one on the spot, bidding 'golden-tongued Romance' be silent, and only then began to read.