He started at the pacific. All his men/looked at each other with a wild surmise--/silent, upon a peak in Darien"; "Beauty is truth, truth Beauty, --that is all/ ye know on earth, and all ye need to know"; The author of these and many other lines fixed permanently in the shared consciousness of those who speak English, John Keats was an extremely unlikely candidate for poetic immortality. Born into a working-class family two centuries ago. Orphaned in childhood, his work was subjected to vicious attacks by established literary critics, dead in his mid-twenties from tuberculosis, he overcame all obstacles, not only to write some of the finest poems in the language, but also to form, in the minds of millions of people.
             John Keats was born in London on October 31, 1795. The first child of Thomas Keats he was a livery-stable keeper. And his wife Frances (Jennings) Keats was a housewife. Three more sons were born one of whom died in infancy. A daughter was born to the couple before Thomas's death in April 1804 from a horse accident. With four very young children to care for. Frances married a man named William Rawlings in 1805. The marriage was not successful and when the couple separated in the following year she and her four children went to live with her mother. John Keats received his earliest education at a private school in Enfield run buy the Reverend John Clarke. Among his classmates was the headmaster's son, Charles Cowden clarke.
             Who would be his lifelong friend. Keats's mother died of tuberculosis in February 1810, and in 1811 he was taken out of school and apprenticed to Thomas Hammond, a surgeon at Edmonton hospital. It was during this time that he began to read poetry seriously and to write it himself.
             His apprenticeship ended by mutual consent in 1815,
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