John Keats died when he was only twenty-five, an age at which Wordsworth had still not begun to write the poems for which he is known today. The brevity and intensity of Keats's career are unmatched in English poetry. He achieved so much at such a young age that readers have always speculated about his potential had he lived to reach artistic maturity.

Keats came from very humble origins. His father, the keeper of a livery stable, was killed in a fall from a horse when Keats was eight; his mother died of tuberculosis when he was fourteen. Keats had been fortunate enough as a boy to attend an excellent private school near London, where his teacher introduced him to poetry, music, and the theater. But soon after his mother died, his guardian, a hardheaded businessman, took Keats out of school and made him an apprentice to a surgeon and apothecary. In 1815 Keats continued his study of medicine more formally at Guy's Hospital in London. He qualified the next year to practice as an apothecary, but it was at this time that he decided, much to his guardian's displeasure, to devote his life to poetry.

Keats had become friends in London with Leigh Hunt, a well-known literary critic and political radical, who encouraged Keats to take himself seriously as a writer. Hunt also introduced him to other leading literary figures of the day, among whom were Hazlitt, Lamb, and Shelley. Hunt and his circle provided Keats with a friendly and encouraging audience. But Keats had his difficulties at first. Some of his early poems lack the control and originality of expression that characterize his best verse. A long mythological poem entitled Endymion, published in 1818, was severely attacked by conservative reviewers, and at least some of their criticisms were justified. Keats himself realized that Endymion had its faults, that in writing it he was learning and experimenting "fitting myself for verses fit to live," as he says in the preface. He was already at work on an even more ambitious project, an epic inspired by Milton's Paradise Lost, which he was to call Hyptrim. Keats was driven by an increasingly independent sense of his own artistic potential, and by a burning ambition lo measure himself against the greatest English poets: Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth.

The year 1818 was a difficult one for Keats. He was able to take the negative reviews of Endymion in his stride, but personal problems began to weigh heavily on him. As the eldest of four children, Keats felt a special responsibility and closeness to his two brothers and his sister. When his brother George, who had emigrated to America, ran into financial difficulties. Keats worked hard to earn extra money To help him. His younger brother Tom contracted tuberculosis, and Keats cared for him constantly, running the risk, as he well knew, of contracting the disease himself. In the autumn of 1818, Keats fell desperately in love with Fanny Brawne, a pretty, vivacious girl to whom he soon became engaged. But by this time Keats's own poor health, poverty, and relentless devotion to poetry made an immediate marriage impossible. The year came to a dismal end with Tom's death in December.