Keats, John

John Keats was born in 1795, the son of a livery-stable keeper. An orphan by the age of fourteen, he was apprenticed to a surgeon for a time, but gave up medicine for poetry. His luxuriant early work was famously savaged by the critics, but he remained assured in his conviction that he would eventually "be among the English poets," and his volume of 1820 was more favorably viewed. Keats's longed-for marriage to Fanny Brawne was prevented by the onset of the tuberculosis that killed him, at the age of twenty-six, in 1821.