Keats's father was a groom in a London livery-stable. The poet was apprenticed at fifteen to a surgeon. At school he had studied Latin but not Greek. He, who of all the English poets had the most purely Hellenic spirit, made acquaintance with Greek literature and art only through the medium of classical dictionaries, translations, and popular mythologies; and later through the marbles and casts in the British Museum. His friend, the artist Haydon, lent him a copy of Chapman's Homer, and the impression that it made upon him he recorded in his sonnet, _On First Looking into Chapman's Homer_. Other poems of the same inspiration are his three sonnets, _To Homer_, _On Seeing the Elgin Marbles_, _On a Picture of Leander_, _Lamia_, and the beautiful _Ode on a Grecian Urn_. But Keats's art was retrospective and eclectic, the blossom of a double root; and "golden-tongued Romance with serene lute" had her part in him, as well as the classics. In his seventeenth year he had read the _Faerie Queene_, and from Spenser he went on to a study of Chaucer, Shakspere and Milton. Then he took up Italian and read Ariosto. The influence of these studies is seen in his poem, _Isabella, or the Pot of Basil_, taken from a story of Boccaccio; in his wild ballad, _La Belle Dame sans Merci_; and in his love tale, the _Eve of St. Agnes_, with its wealth of mediæval adornment. In the _Ode to Autumn_, and _Ode to a Nightingale_, the Hellenic choiceness is found touched with the warmer hues of romance.
There is something deeply tragic in the short story of Keats's life. The seeds of consumption were in him; he felt the stirrings of a potent genius, but he knew that he could not wait for it to unfold, but must die
Before high-piled books in charactry Hold like rich garners the full-ripened grain.
His disease was aggravated, possibly, by the stupid brutality with which the reviewers had treated _Endymion_; and certainly by the hopeless love which devoured him. "The very thing which I want to live most for," he wrote, "will be a great occasion of my death. If I had any chance of recovery, this passion would kill me." In the autumn of 1820, his disease gaining apace, he went on a sailing vessel to Italy, accompanied by a single friend, a young artist named Severn. The change was of no avail, and he died at Rome a few weeks after, in his twenty-sixth year.