John Keats, selected poems Timeline

John Keats born, the eldest of Thomas and Frances Keats’ four children

Starts school at Enfield Academy. Much influenced by the Headmaster, John Clarke and becomes a friend of Clarke’s son, Cowden

Death of Keats’ father (April 15). Mother remarries within two months

Keats becomes eldest male in family (aged 14)

Starts apprenticeship to surgeon Thomas Hammond in Edmonton

Continues friendship with the Clarkes at Enfield

Begins to ‘devour’ Ovid, Milton, Virgil and especially Edmund Spenser - The Faerie Queene is a work which awakens Keats’ genius.

First known efforts to write verse: Imitation of Spenser, To Lord Byron

Moves to London and registers at Guy’s Hospital for surgeon/apothecary course

Keats meets Leigh Hunt who encourages his writing and becomes a life-long influence

Writes I stood tip-toe and Sleep and Poetry

Decides to leave medical career to concentrate on poetry

Writes On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer

O Solitude is his first published poem (appears in The Examiner)

First volume of Poems published on March 3

Goes on six week walking tour of England and Scotland with Charles Algernon Brown; becomes ill

Returns to London to find brother Tom ill with tuberculosis 

Begins Hyperion when nursing his brother

Tom dies aged 19 

Moves to Hampstead

Writes many of his best-known poems, including: The Eve of St Agnes, The Eve of St Mark and the odes To Psyche, To a Nightingale, On a Grecian Urn, To Autumn, To Indolence

Shows the first symptoms of tuberculosis