Keats: Skip the Bio, Read the Poems

John Keats was born in 1795. Orphaned at the age of 14, he was apprenticed by a manipulative guardian to an apothecary, a kind of general medical practitioner. “Always writing poetry,” recalled a fellow apprentice. Though formal training as a surgeon’s assistant followed at Guy’s Hospital—this in the harrowing days before anesthesia—Keats was immersed in London’s literary society by the time he received his medical license. In 1817, at the age of 21, he published his first book, called simply Poems; a second book, Endymion, appeared the following year. Reviews were savage, but Keats dismissed them in a letter to his brother George as “a mere matter of the moment,” adding that “I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death.”