Poetry
20 “Ode to a Nightingale” by John Keats (Ode)
Biography
John Keats was born in London on October 31, 1795. His father helped manage businesses, an inn and a livery stable, owned by his father-in-law, John Jennings. His childhood was traumatized by the death of his father in a riding accident in April of 1804 and his mother’s hasty remarriage to William Rawlings, who replaced Keats’s father as the family property manager but not, apparently, as a responsible father figure. Conflicts over the dispersal of John Jennings’s considerable estate after his death broke the family apart and would plague Keats with financial problems all of his life, though his share of the estate, entangled in court proceedings, would have been considerable.
Eventually, the family did reconcile, and Keats did well at John Clarke’s school in Enfield, where, despite his small size, he was an excellent athlete and a prizewinning student, popular with the other boys at the school. Tragedy struck again when Keats’s mother died in March 1810. Her mother appointed a family friend, Richard Abbey, executor of her estate.
Keats chose—or had chosen for him—medicine as his career. In the summer of 1810, he began work as apprentice to the family doctor, Thomas Hammond, and he was accepted into medical school at Guy’s Hospital in October of 1815. He did well, and in July of 1816, he earned the degree, which would qualify him to practice as a pharmacist, physician, and surgeon.
Keats continued his friendship with Charles Clarke, whose father was headmaster of the school they attended together. Clarke encouraged Keats’s budding interest in writing poetry, and he introduced Keats to the radical editor Leigh Hunt, with whom Clarke had shared some of Keats’s work. Hunt was impressed, especially with the early sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” written in October of 1816, after Clarke had loaned Keats George Chapman’s translation of Homer’s great epic poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey. Keats was a member now of the Hunt circle—he met poet Percy Shelley in December. Soon they were seen, justifiably so, as the rising starts of English poetry.
Abbey was, understandably, furious that Keats was giving up medicine to be a poet, especially given that the considerable expense of attending medical school would exacerbate Keats’s financial problems. Keats’s first book, simply titled Poems, appeared in March of 1817, but it was hardly a commercial success. He spent the next six months working on his long poem, Endymion, about the moon goddess Cynthia, who falls in love with the mortal shepherd Endymion and eventually assumes mortal shape herself so that they can be together. It was published in 1818 to indifferent reviews and poor sales. Still, Keats’s reputation was growing, and he was enjoying an active social life, travelling throughout the English countryside (on walking tours, mainly) and partying with a large group of London’s artists and poets, Shelley and Wordsworth among the