John Keats As A Romantic Poet

812 Words2 Pages

Emily Piriz
Mr. Metz
Period 8
13 April 2014
John Keats: The Romanticist
When people hear "the Romanticism Era" and the poets that were involved in this era, they usually think about John Keats. Even though Keats lived for a short twenty-six years, he impacted the Romanticism Era like no other. The poems that he wrote and the difficult early life that he had made Keats the perfect Romanticist poet.
John Keats was born on October 31, 1795 in the town of London, England to Thomas and Frances Jennings Keats; he was the eldest of five brothers and sisters, one of whom died at birth. Both of Keats’ parents died when he was at a relatively young age. When he was only eight years old, Keats’ father, who was a stable keeper, died from getting trampled by a horse, and his mother died when he was fourteen from tuberculosis, which is a bacterial infection that can spread through the lymph nodes and bloodstream to any organ in your body, according to webmd.com. John attended a school, Enfield Academy, who the head master was John Clarke, whose son Charles Cowden Clarke did much to encourage Keats's literary objectives (“Keats”). In 1811, Keats left school to become an apprentice to a surgeon. It did not take him long to realize that this is not what he wanted to do, so in 1814 Keats cancelled the apprenticeship and decided to dedicate his life to writing poetry.
“His first mature poem is the sonnet On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer (1816), which was inspired by his excited reading of George Chapman’s classic 17th-century translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey” (“John”). Charles Clarke introduced Keats to Leigh Hunt, the publisher of the “Examiner”. Keats's first book, Poems, was published in March 1817, the most interesting poem in ...

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...ing of humanity” (“Hyperion”).
The Romanticist Era was an era where everything everyone wrote about was loving. This was perfect for John Keats because he implimented his thoughts and emotions into his writings very well. During this era the poets created a new form of poetry called Odes, which are lyrical poems in the form of an address to a particular subject. A lot of the poetry that was released during this time period had not only to do with romance, but with how the poets felt about anything.
Keats did a lot in the small amount of time he spent on earth. The era that Keats was born in was the perfect era for him. Though he only had one major successful book of poems, that one book made him one of the most notable names that came from the Romanticism Era. The poems that he wrote and the difficult early life that he had made Keats the perfect Romanticist poet.

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