Lamia by John Keats

Lamia by John Keats

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This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.

This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.

Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

John Keats was born in Moorfields in October 1795, the son of a livery stable manager. His father died of TB in 1804 and his mother in 1810. He had gotten a good education at John Clarke's Enfield private school by that time. He began his professional training as an apprentice to a surgeon in 1811 and completed it at Guy's Hospital in 1816. His decision to devote himself to poetry rather than a medical profession was bold, based more on a personal challenge than any genuine achievement. Early Mends like Charles Cowden Clarke and J.

H.Reynolds, and he met Leigh Hunt, whose Examiner had already published Keats' first poem, in October 1816. Poems (1817) was published only seven months later. Despite the Hunt circle's great hopes, it was a flop. By the time Endymion was published in 1818, Keats' name had become synonymous with Hunt's Cockney School, and the Conservative Blackwood's Magazine attacked him as a lower-class vulgarian who had no right to aspire to 'poetry.'

Yet, Keats' fame was based on posterity rather than contemporary literary politics. His inspiration and challenge came from Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth. From his letters, it is clear that Keats matured at an incredible rate. He wrote The Eve of St Agnes, La Belle Dame sans Merci, The Major Odes, Lamia, and the deeply exploratory Fall of Hyperion in 1819, after working on the magnificent epic fragment Hyperion in 1818.

Whilst preparing the 1820 book for the press, Keats was already ailing, and by the time it was published in July, he was very ill. In 1821, he died in Rome. Although Keats' final volume received considerable critical acclaim at the time, it wasn't until the later half of the nineteenth century that his place in English Romanticism became clear, and it wasn't until this century that it was fully realized.