Moves into Wentworth Place, Hampstead, with Brown.

25 December Dines with Fanny Brawne and her mother, and reaches an ‘understanding’ with Fanny.

1819

January Goes to Chichester, and visits Bedhampton with Brown. Writes The Eve of St Agnes.

13–17 February Writes The Eve of St Mark.

April-May Gives up Hyperion. Writes La Belle Dame sans Merci, experiments with the sonnet form, and composes the major odes (except for To Autumn).

3 April Fanny and Mrs Brawne move into the other half of Wentworth Place.

12 May Receives worrying letter from George Keats in America, and begins to consider the necessity of taking a job.

31 May Thinks of going to live near Teignmouth or becoming a ship’s surgeon.

9 June Gives up both ideas.

17 June Asks Haydon and others to return loans he has made them.

28 June-10 September Stays in Shanklin, Isle of Wight, moving to Winchester with Brown on 12 August, working on Otho the Great, Lamia and The Fall of Hyperion.

15 September Returns to Winchester after a trip to London.

19 September Writes To Autumn.

21 September Has abandoned The Fall of Hyperion.

8 October Leaves Winchester for London, and takes lodgings in Westminster.

November Living with Brown at Wentworth Place, Hampstead, next door to Fanny Brawne. Writes King Stephen, starts The Cap and Bells, and returns to The Fall of Hyperion.

22 December He is ‘rather unwell’. By the end of the month he is engaged to Fanny Brawne.

1820

9–28 January George Keats in London, having returned from America in an attempt to sort out the tangled affairs of the Keats children’s inheritance. In the meantime, Otho the Great rejected by Covent Garden.

3 February Returns from Liverpool, having seen George off, by stage coach. At 11 p.m. has severe haemorrhage. Confined to house for the rest of the month.

c. 13 February Offers to break off his engagement with Fanny Brawne, who refuses.

12–13 March He is revising Lamia.

27 April Taylor and Hessey receive the manuscript of the Lamia volume.

May Moves to Kentish Town after Brown gives up Wentworth Place.

10 May La Belle Dame sans Merci published in Hunt’s Indicator.

c. 11 June Reads and corrects proof of Lamia volume.

22 June Has an attack of blood-spitting.

23 June-mid-August Moves to Leigh Hunt’s house so that he can be better looked after.

July Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems published by Taylor and Hessey.

5 July His doctor has ordered him to go to Italy.

August Is asked by Shelley to stay with him in Italy. Moves to stay with the Brawnes at Wentworth Place. Makes an informal will. Francis Jeffrey gives a belated but sympathetic review of Endymion and the Lamia volume in the Edinburgh Review.

23 August Abbey refuses to give him money.

13 September Severn decides to accompany him to Italy.

18 September Sails from Gravesend by night.

28 September Having been held back by bad weather and then been becalmed, he lands with Severn at Portsmouth and visits Bedhampton. Resumes voyage next day.

c. 1 October Lands at Lulworth Cove; according to Robert Gittings, writes the Bright Star sonnet in his copy of Shakespeare’s Poems (but see pp. 708–9).

21–31 October His ship held in quarantine at Naples for ten days.

15 November Reaches Rome, and takes lodgings in the Piazza di Spagna.

30 November Writes his last known letter (to Charles Brown).

10 December Has a relapse.

1821

23 February Dies at 11 p.m.

26 February Buried in Rome’s Protestant Cemetery.

17 March The news of his death reaches London.

Further Reading

Both for themselves and for the light they throw on his life and poetry, Keats’s letters are indispensable further reading. The definitive edition is H. E. Rollins’s The Letters of John Keats 1814–21, 2 vols., Harvard University Press, 1958, which contains transcripts of the single source for several of Keats’s poems and corrects Garrod. Earlier editions include M. B. Forman’s two-volume text, 4th edn, Oxford University Press, 1952. A useful selection, edited by Robert Gittings, is Letters of John Keats, Oxford University Press, 1970, which replaces F. Page’s edition for the World’s Classics series.

EDITIONS

John Keats, Poems, London, 1817.

John Keats, Endymion, London, 1818.

John Keats, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems, London, 1820.

R. M. Milnes (ed.), Life, Letters, and Literary Remains, of John Keats, 2 vols., 1848.

R. M. Milnes (ed.), Another Version of Keats’s Hyperion [i.e. The Fall of Hyperion], in Miscellanies of the Philobiblion Society III, 1856–7.

H.