John Keats was one of the most famous English poets of the Romantic Movement. His personal life had a considerable effect on his work, as well as the social and political events of the time, “time of upheaval in all quarters a time of new political thinking, of social and humanitarian reform, a revolutionary time” . “It was also a time when a literary career could make its appeal further down the social scale than ever before.’’ “As a member of the second generation of English Romantic poets” , he was strongly influenced by authors of the earlier waves of the movement such as William Wordsworth or Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Born in 1795, John Keats was the first child of Thomas Keats and Frances Jennings, a ‘lower’ class family from London. He had three brothers and one sister. Although not much is known about the family in those years, his close relationship with the other family members, especially his brothers and sister, confirms a relatively happy and normal early childhood. The family’s economic circumstances improved when his grandparents retired, leaving his father in charge of the family business.
At seven years of age, John Keats began his education at the Enfield school, where “the headmaster, John Clarke, was an enlightened, humane and liberal-minded teacher a rare man in those unsettled times when extreme Toryism dominated the nation.” Having a teacher like Clarke, rather uncommon for the early nineteenth century, can be considered a reason for Keats’s determination, love of books and willingness to study. However, the tragic events to come, the death of his father, grandfather and later of his beloved mother, had an even stronger impact on him, changing his life “and for the fourteen-year-old Keats, books now became a refuge, as well as a challenge.”
In 1811 decides to leave school and starts his apprenticeship to an apothecary in Edmonton. Encouraged and helped by his friend Charles Cowden Clarke, his former teacher’s son, he continues...