‘Thou wast not born for death'

Dismissed as ‘the Cockney Homer’ and a fey lovelorn dreamer, John Keats was actually a robust and spirited man with medical training and a penchant for fisticuffs, says Jack Watkins, on the 200th anniversary of the poet’s premature demise

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THE Lake District contributed William Wordsworth to the pantheon of English Romantic poets and Northamptonshire can claim to have given it John Clare, but London yielded ‘the Cockney Homer’, John Keats. The latter, of course, was not a poet of his region in the way Wordsworth and Clare came to be seen of theirs. The ‘cockney’ epithet was a disparaging term hurled by reactionary critics who hated his association with the radical publisher and essayist Leigh Hunt. Yet although Keats—whose Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn and To Autumn are now included among the finest examples of 19th-century verse—met his premature end 200 years ago this month (in February, 1821), aged 25, in Rome, it was London that shaped his life and work.

Keats’s output was restricted to 54 published poems in his lifetime. However, contrary to the popular image of him as a crude upstart or alternatively, by those who championed him, as a noble savage, Keats’s background, although modest, was not poor. He was born in Moorgate in 1795, where his father was the manager of the livery stables of the Swan and Hoop alehouse, run by Keats’s grandfather. The business prospered sufficiently to contemplate sending Keats, the eldest of four children, to Harrow, before he was sent to Enfield School, a village academy on north London’s outskirts.