Page 99 - DENG203_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_IV

Elective English—IV

Notes When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific — and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise —
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
The sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”
October 1816

After finishing his apprenticeship with Hammond, John Keats registered as a medical student at
Guy’s Hospital (now part of King’s College London) and began there in October 1815. In a
month of starting, Keats was accepted as a dresser at the hospital, assisting surgeons during
operations, and became almost equal to a junior house surgeon of today. It was an important
promotion marking a different aptitude for medicine, the position increased workload and
responsibility. His long and expensive medical training with Hammond and at Guy’s Hospital
led his family to accept that this would be his lifelong career which would assure financial
security, and it look like that at this point Keats had an honest desire to become a doctor. Keats
lodged near the hospital at 28 St Thomas’s Street in Southwark, with other medical students.
Keats’s training took up growing amounts of his writing time and he felt increasingly unsure
about his medical profession. John Keats’s first surviving poem, An Imitation of Spenser, had
been written in 1814, when Keats was only 19 years of age. Now, powerfully drawn by ambition,
encouraged by fellow poets such as Byron and Leigh Hunt, and beleaguered by family monetary
crises, he suffered stages of depression. His brother George wrote that John “feared that he
should never be a poet, & if he was not he would destroy himself”. John Keats, in 1816 received
his apothecary’s licence making him eligible to practise as an apothecary, physician and surgeon,
but before the end of the year he announced to his custodian that he was determined to be a poet
and not a surgeon.
Although he continued working and his training at Guy’s, John Keats was giving increasing
time to the study of literature, experimenting with verse forms, mainly at this time sonnets.,
Leigh Hunt agreed to publish the sonnet O Solitude in his magazine The Examiner in May 1816.
The Examiner was a leading liberal magazine back then. It is the first appearance of Keats’s
poems in print and Charles Cowden Clarke mentions it as his friend’s red letter day, first proof
that Keats’s ambitions were valid and effective. In summers the same year, he went with Clarke
to the seaside town of Margate to write. There he began Calidore and started the era of his great
letter writing. After returning to London he took lodgings at 8 Dean Street, Southwark and
braced himself for further study in order to become a member of the Royal College of Surgeons.
In October, Clarke familiarised Keats to the influential Hunt, a close friend of Byron and Shelley.
Five months later Poems, the first volume of Keats verse, was published, which comprised of
“Sleep and Poetry” and “I stood tiptoe”, both poems powerfully influenced by Hunt. It was a
serious failure, arousing little interest, although Reynolds studied it favourably in The Champion.
Clarke commented that the book “might have emerged in Timbuctoo”. Keats’s publishers,
Charles and James Ollier, felt embarrassed because of the book. Keats instantly changed publishers
to Taylor and Hessey on Fleet Street. Unlike Olliers, Keats’s new publishers were enthusiastic
about his work. Within a month of the publication of Poems they were planning a new Keats
volume and had given him an advance. Hessey became a stable friend to Keats and made the
firm’s rooms available for young writers to meet. Their publishing lists would come to include
Coleridge, Hazlitt, Clare, Hogg, Carlyle and Lamb.

At Taylor and Hessey Keats met their Eton-educated lawyer Richard Woodhouse. Woodhouse,
who advised the publishers on literary and legal matters, was extremely impressed by Poems.
Though he noted that Keats could be “wayward, trembling, easily daunted”, Woodhouse was

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