John Keats

One of John's sonnets, called "To Solitude, " was printed in 1816, in the liberal newspaper, The Examiner. This sonnet was good, but it wasn't until a little later in the year that he wrote "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer," which proved that he was the man to watch. His first volume of poetry appeared on 3 March 1817, and it didn't sell very well at all. John was depressed, but kept writing. Shelley had challenged him to an epic poetry writing contest over the summer, and for that contest, John wrote Endymion, though he didn't finish it within the time limit, so I guess Shelley won. But John was the sought-after young poet in London, and he lived in a whirl of parties and dances, even though he didn't much like crowds.

In June of 1818, John apparently became convinced that he would have only three more years to live. He'd already written many of his most famous poems, but he was still convinced that he hadn't yet done enough to leave his mark on the literary world. His brother George had announced plans to emigrate to Illinois with his new wife, and his brother Tom had just started showing signs of consumption and needed John to look after him. And to top it all off, John had just fallen madly in love with a young woman named Frances Brawne. All of this overwhelmed and depressed him. He tried to lose himself in his latest poem, Hyperion, but that's hard to do when you're spending most of your time in a sickroom.

Tom died in December of 1818. Though John should have received £500 from Tom's estate, Abbey (the guardian) decreed that he couldn't have it until his sister Frances turned 21. It wasn't until a year or so after John's death that anyone realized that Abbey had misappropriated nearly £1000 from Alice Jennings' estate. To make matters worse, brother George had gone broke and was begging John to send him whatever he could scavenge from the family funds. Desparate, John convinced his publishers to issue another volume of his poetry, but this was not a stunning success. Dead broke, he still allowed George to have the remnants of the family estate. John was rapidly becoming dependant on the help of his friends, people like Leigh Hunt (who'd gotten married and settled down some) and Charles Brown. John was also developing consumption, coughing up blood in February of 1820.

It was around this time that, without consulting John, Charles began arrangements for sending John to Italy. John didn't want to be so far away from his ladylove, but he felt incapable of arguing. He left in September of1820, accompanied by Joseph Severn, an up and coming portrait artist. Once in Rome, the two men moved into lodgings across the piazza from an English doctor named Clark. John was not allowed to write poetry and only given the dullest books to read, as emotional excitement was considered very bad for consumptive patients. John was definitely in a state; he stopped opening letters, even from his beloved Frances, after a month or so. In December, he tried to commit suicide by taking laudanum, but Severn stopped him. Later, delirious from the disease and the starvation diet Clark prescribed, John would rant at Severn for stopping him and even went so far as to accuse his friends of having poisoned him back in London.

On 23 February 1821, John died. Frances, upon hearing the news, seemed all right for a few weeks, then fell ill, and after recovering began wearing widows' weeds. John had requested that his tomstone read only "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." Charles Brown, feeling that was too brusque, had this carved on the stone instead: "This Grave contains all that was Mortal of a YOUNG ENGLISH POET Who on his Death Bed, in the Malicious Power of his Enemies, Desired these Words to be engraven on his Tomb Stone 'Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water'".

Source: Ward, Eileen. John Keats: The Making of a Poet. New York: Viking Press, 1963.