Poems, Odes, Sonnets

77 pp. A collection of poems, odes and sonnets by John Keats. Keats, John (1795 - 1821), poet, was born in London, the eldest of the five children of Thomas Keats (c.1773 - 1804), inn manager, and his wife, Frances, later Frances Rawlings (1775 - 1810), daughter of John and Alice Jennings. Keats was baptized at St Botolph without Bishopsgate on 18 December 1795. He and his family seem to have regarded 29 October as his birthday, although the baptismal entry gives 31 October. An important factor in the development of Keats's reputation, during his life and in the decades following his death, was the belief that he was born in a coaching inn, the Swan and Hoop at 24 The Pavement, Moorgate, and that his father, Thomas, was an 'ostler' in the inn. This supposed humble origin, reinforced in the public mind by Leigh Hunt's ill-informed account in Lord Byron and some of his Contemporaries (1828), played its part in the notoriously savage politically inspired attacks made on Keats by tory reviewers during his lifetime, and it deeply coloured the nineteenth-century biographical tradition. But there is no evidence about Keats's place of birth, and his family background, for all its obscurities, was far from impoverished. Little is known of Keats's father, described as a man of common sense and respectability, whom Keats resembled in a short, stocky build, and an attractively alert bearing. The family name appears to originate in Devon or Cornwall, and there is evidence that Thomas Keats may have come from Reading. His marriage on 9 October 1794 at St George's, Hanover Square, was apparently a rushed affair; the couple were young and there were no family witnesses. Frances Jennings, the poet's mother, was recalled as excitable and attractive, and there is much to suggest also a reckless impetuosity. Her father was a man of property who purchased the leasehold of the Swan and Hoop in 1774, adding the next-door property in 1785. Keats's brother George was born on 28 February 1797. The family moved to Craven Street, off the City Road, at Christmas 1798. Thomas Keats was born on 28 November 1799, and a fourth son, Edward, on 28 April 1801. George, Tom, and Edward were baptized at St Leonard, Shoreditch, on 24 September 1801, but Edward died before the end of the following year and was buried in Bunhill Fields on 9 December 1802. George and Tom played a significant part in Keats's short, intense life - George in the role of hard-headed realist, while Tom enjoyed a special empathy with the poet. - Oxford Dictionary of National Biography