John Keats: The Tragic Life of a Romantic Poet.
John Keats was born in 1795 and wouldn't live to see his twenty-sixth birthday. Oddly enough, none of his family would see it either. One by one, Keats would have to face death in the eye and try to overcome major losses in his short-lived life. The life of John Keats, who is credited as being one of great Romantic poets, was in itself a tragedy, beginning with the death of his parents when he was a young child, the death of his brother Tom, and finally the death and demise of Keats himself.
Keats lost both of his parents before he reached his twenties. The death of Keats parents forced young Keats to take on the role of father to his younger siblings (Kipperman 180). Keats first lost a parent when his father died from an accident when he fell off his horse and suffered a head injury (180). "On the night of 15 April 1804, when Keats had been in school less than a year, an accident happened that would alter his life and proved to be the first in a series of losses and dislocations that would pursue him throughout his brief life- (180). The death of John's father would indirectly lead to the unfair distribution of the inheritance that he left behind for his children (Bate 12). It was later found that Keats would have inherited two thousand pounds if his father would have been alive to distribute the money evenly. This money would eventually have made life easier on John and his siblings due to the fact that that amount of money was considered enough to have a normal life (Kipperman 181). .
Another great loss was soon to hit Keats with the death of his mother in March of 1810 (Hirst-chronology). Immediately after the death of her husband, John's father, she remarried a man named William Rawlings (Kipperman 180). Soon, she became unhappy and became increasingly ill with tuberculosis and divorced William and returned home to be with her children, her death followed three months later (180).
