Keats’s father was a groom in a London livery-stable.  The poet was apprenticed at fifteen to a surgeon.  At school he had studied Latin but not Greek.  He, who of all the English poets had the most purely Hellenic spirit, made acquaintance with Greek literature and art only through the medium of classical dictionaries, translations, and popular mythologies; and later through the marbles and casts in the British Museum.  His friend, the artist Haydon, lent him a copy of Chapman’s Homer, and the impression that it made upon him he recorded in his sonnet, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.  Other poems of the same inspiration are his three sonnets, To Homer, On Seeing the Elgin Marbles, On a Picture of Leander, Lamia, and the beautiful Ode on a Grecian Urn.  But Keats’s art was retrospective and eclectic, the blossom of a double root; and “golden-tongued Romance with serene lute” had her part in him, as well as the classics.  In his seventeenth year he had read the Faerie Queene, and from Spenser he went on to a study of Chaucer, Shakspere and Milton.  Then he took up Italian and read Ariosto.  The influence of these studies is seen in his poem, Isabella, or the Pot of Basil, taken from a story of Boccaccio; in his wild ballad, La Belle Dame sans Merci; and in his love tale, the Eve of St. Agnes, with its wealth of mediaeval adornment.  In the Ode to Autumn, and Ode to a Nightingale, the Hellenic choiceness is found touched with the warmer hues of romance.

There is something deeply tragic in the short story of Keats’s life.  The seeds of consumption were in him; he felt the stirrings of a potent genius, but he knew that he could not wait for it to unfold, but must die

  Before high-piled books in charactry
  Hold like rich garners the full-ripened grain.

His disease was aggravated, possibly, by the stupid brutality with which the reviewers had treated Endymion; and certainly by the hopeless love which devoured him.  “The very thing which I want to live most for,” he wrote, “will be a great occasion of my death.  If I had any chance of recovery, this passion would kill me.”  In the autumn of 1820, his disease gaining apace, he went on a sailing vessel to Italy, accompanied by a single friend, a young artist named Severn.  The change was of no avail, and he died at Rome a few weeks after, in his twenty-sixth year.

Keats was, above all things, the artist, with that love of the beautiful and that instinct for its reproduction which are the artist’s divinest gifts.  He cared little about the politics and philosophy of his day, and he did not make his poetry the vehicle of ideas.  It was sensuous poetry, the poetry of youth and gladness.  But if he had lived, and if, with wider knowledge of men and deeper experience of life, he had attained to Wordsworth’s spiritual insight and to Byron’s power of passion