But before the year was out he had announced to his guardian that he had resolved to give up medicine and live as a poet. In 1816, Keats was awarded his apothecary’s licence which gave him the right to practice as an apothecary, doctor and surgeon. His brother George wrote that John ‘feared that he should never be a poet, & if he was not he would destroy himself’. He was clearly set not on medicine but on being a poet. The earliest poem by Keats that survives was written in 1814, when Keats was nineteen years old. But Keats had not given up his writing and became increasingly frustrated by the time-consuming nature of his job as a doctor. It was a rapid promotion suggesting considerable aptitude for medicine. Within a month, he was accepted as a ‘dresser’ at the hospital, the equivalent of a junior house surgeon today.
After his apprenticeship, Keats registered as a medical student at Guy's Hospital. Keats lodged in the attic above the surgery at 7 Church Street, Enfield (then Middlesex), until 1813. When Keats was fifteen, Abbey withdrew him from the Clarke School, Enfield, and sent him as an apprentice to Thomas Hammond, a surgeon and apothecary. His maternal grandmother found him two guardians, both London merchants, Richard Abbey and John Rowland Sandell. His father died when Keats was eight years old and his mother died when he was fourteen, of tuberculosis. His father was livery-stable keeper and John Keats (hereafter, just ‘Keats’) was the oldest of four surviving children. John Keats, one of the most famous English Romantic poets was born on October 31, 1795, in London. This by way of illustration of the importance of birdsong not only to poetry, but to music too.
Messiaen was a twentieth century composer who was fascinated by birdsong, notating bird songs worldwide and incorporating birdsong transcriptionsinto his music. The music you heard just now was Oliver Messiaen’s, ‘Le Réveil des oiseaux’. Tonight I would like to explore ideas of immortality and indeterminacy in Keats’s celebrated Ode to a Nightingale.
In my last lectures I considered ideas of remembering and remembrance in relation to Gray’s famous Elegy. In addition to analysing some well-known poems, I want to show how the different literary genres lend themselves to different kinds of exploration – essentially of the human condition. This is the second of four lectures that I am giving on poetry, which follow four which I gave on the novel.
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