[1] By the end of the century, he was placed in the canon of English literature, strongly influencing many writers of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; the Encyclopædia Britannica of 1888 described his "Ode to a Nightingale" as "one of the final masterpieces".

[2][3] He was the eldest of four surviving children; his younger siblings were George (1797–1841), Thomas (1799–1818), and Frances Mary "Fanny" (1803–1889), who later married the Spanish author Valentín de Llanos Gutiérrez [es].

His father first worked as an ostler[5] at the stables attached to the Swan and Hoop Inn owned by his father-in-law, John Jennings, an establishment he later managed, and where the growing family lived for some years.

[12] The headmaster's son, Charles Cowden Clarke, also became an important mentor and friend, introducing Keats to Renaissance literature, including Tasso, Spenser, and Chapman's translations.

In October 1815, having finished his five-year apprenticeship with Hammond, Keats registered as a medical student at Guy's Hospital, now part of King's College London, and began studying there.

[3][12] He lodged near the hospital, at 28 St Thomas's Street in Southwark, with other medical students, including Henry Stephens who gained fame as an inventor and ink magnate.

Now, strongly drawn by ambition, inspired by fellow poets such as Leigh Hunt and Lord Byron, and beleaguered by family financial crises, he suffered periods of depression.

[27] Despite the bad reviews of Poems, Hunt published the essay "Three Young Poets" (Shelley, Keats, and Reynolds) and the sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer", foreseeing great things to come.

[28] He introduced Keats to many prominent men in his circle, including the editor of The Times, Thomas Barnes; the writer Charles Lamb; the conductor Vincent Novello; and the poet John Hamilton Reynolds, who would become a close friend.

Keats had spent a great deal on his medical training, and despite his state of financial hardship and indebtedness, made large loans to friends such as the painter Benjamin Haydon.

[48] In 1819 Keats wrote "The Eve of St. Agnes", "La Belle Dame sans Merci", "Hyperion", "Lamia" and a play, Otho the Great, critically damned and not performed until 1950.

[3] They were unimpressed with the collection, finding the presented versions of "Lamia" confusing, and describing "St Agnes" as having a "sense of pettish disgust" and "a 'Don Juan' style of mingling up sentiment and sneering" concluding it was "a poem unfit for ladies".

Clark eventually diagnosed consumption (tuberculosis) and placed Keats on a starvation diet of an anchovy and a piece of bread a day intended to reduce the blood flow to his stomach.

On the site today, Marsh wrote, "In the old part of the graveyard, barely a field when Keats was buried here, there are now umbrella pines, myrtle shrubs, roses, and carpets of wild violets".

Aware that he was dying, he wrote to Fanny Brawne in February 1820, "I have left no immortal work behind me – nothing to make my friends proud of my memory – but I have lov'd the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember'd.

Seven weeks after the funeral he wrote Adonais, a despairing elegy,[84] stating that Keats's early death was a personal and public tragedy: The loveliest and the last, The bloom, whose petals nipped before they blew Died on the promise of the fruit.

[81] His poetic sense was based on the conventional tastes of his friend Charles Cowden Clarke, who first introduced him to the classics, and also came from the predilections of Hunt's Examiner, which Keats read as a boy.

[87] Hunt scorned the Augustan or "French" school dominated by Pope and attacked earlier Romantic poets Wordsworth and Coleridge, now in their forties, as unsophisticated, obscure and crude writers.

Keats came to echo these sentiments in his work, identifying himself with a "new school" for a time, somewhat alienating him from Wordsworth, Coleridge and Byron and providing a basis for scathing attacks from Blackwood's and the Quarterly Review.

Keats's posthumous reputation mixed the reviewers' caricature of the simplistic bumbler with the image of a hyper-sensitive genius killed by high feeling, which Shelley later portrayed.

Leigh Hunt's Lord Byron and some of his Contemporaries (1828) gives the first biographical account, strongly emphasising Keats's supposedly humble origins, a misconception which still continues.

[97] His friends Brown, Severn, Dilke, Shelley and his guardian Richard Abbey, his publisher Taylor, Fanny Brawne and many others issued posthumous commentary on Keats's life.

[98] Shelley promoted Keats as someone whose achievement could not be separated from agony, who was 'spiritualised' by his decline and too fine-tuned to endure the harshness of life; the consumptive, suffering image popularly held today.

The idealised image of the heroic romantic poet who battled poverty and died young was inflated by the late arrival of an authoritative biography and the lack of an accurate likeness.

[103][104][105] In 2007 a sculpture of Keats seated on a bench, by sculptor Stuart Williamson, was unveiled at Guys and Saint Thomas' Hospital, London by the Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion.

"[43][112] Keats spent much time considering poetry itself, its constructs and impacts, displaying a deep interest unusual in his milieu, who were more easily distracted by metaphysics or politics, fashions or science.

[3] He and his friends, poets, critics, novelists, and editors wrote to each other daily, and Keats's ideas are bound up in the ordinary, his day-to-day missives sharing news, parody and social commentary.

[110][115] In the letters Keats coined ideas such as the Mansion of Many Apartments and the Chameleon Poet, which came to gain common currency and capture the public imagination, though only making single appearances as phrases in his correspondence.

[116] The poetical mind, Keats argued: has no self – it is every thing and nothing – It has no character – it enjoys light and shade;... What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion [chameleon] Poet.

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, – While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;[88] "To Autumn" was to become one of the most highly regarded poems in the English language.