John Keats was an English poet and letter writer. Keats was born in London on Oct. 31, 1795. Keats was the first of five children. In 1803, at the age of eight, Keats was sent to the Clarke Academy in Enfield, just north of London. At Enfield, Keats met his first literary mentor and loyal friend, Charles Cowden Clarke, son of the headmaster. Keats' father died suddenly in April 1804 after a fall from a horse. The children then went to live with their grandparents, and on Mr. Jennings' death in 1805 moved with their grandmother to Edmonton. After a short-lived second marriage, Keats' mother joined the family in Edmonton. She died of tuberculosis in 1810, nursed in her last days by John. Mrs. Jennings died in 1814, leaving a substantial trust fund of over £800, the greater part of which was tied up in litigation and never reached the children.
             On his departure from school in 1811, Keats decided on a career in medicine, and for the next four years he was an apprentice to a surgeon-apothecary in Edmonton. In 1815 he entered Guy's Hospital in London for a year of training and received his apothecary's certificate in 1816. Meanwhile, Keats' literary interests flowered into a serious dedication to poetry. During his apprentice years he tried his hand at writing some lyric poems and kept up his literary friendship with Clarke. In the summer of 1816 he finally decided to give up medicine, making do as best he could on a meager and uncertain inheritance, and devote himself to a career in poetry.
             Keats first great poem, the sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, was written in October 1817. Keats now made important literary associates: Benjamin Robert Haydon, Leigh Hunt; and, through Hunt, such poets and critics as Shelley, Wordsworth, Charles Lamb, and William Hazlitt. The year 1818 Keats saw many changes in his life, most of them distressing. During much of the spring and fall Keats nursed his brother Tom, who died of tuber...