GENERAL - Keats, science and poetry

dates

1795-1821

started writing from 1814 onwards

Keats - introduction to medicine as a child

At 14 he nursed his mother till her death.

Was educated at Enfield, then apprenticed for 5 years from the summer 1810 with Thomas Hammond a successful apothecary surgeon. During this time also learned from childhood friend and mentor Charles Cowden Clarke who consulted with him on poetic learning

When did Keats start at Guys and what figures did he interact with there? Was he a good student?

1815 - appointed to dressership in March 1816 where lived in hospital full time attending to emergencies.

learned the apex of radical scientific theory through Astley Cooper.

rapid progress as a student - successfully passed difficult new Licentiate examination, showing his attentive nature as a student.

WHen did Keats give up on his medical career? did he think about returning to medicine after this?

by the time his dressership ended in March 1817 after his poetry was professionally published in December 1816

repeatedly voices idea of returning to medicine in letters - admits in March 1819 “I have been … turning it in my head whether I should … study for a physician” just before he composed La Bella Dame Sans Merci

How was Keats’ medical training used pejoratively in response to his poetry

used to denigrate his poetical pretensions - lambasted as an apothecary-turned-poet = lowest status of medical profession.

John Gibson Lockhart, who writes under the pseudonym Z in Blackwoods, ridicules Keats for his medical background - “Back to the shop Mr John, back to plasters, pills, and ointment boxes”

WHat does Keats Anatomical and Physiological notebook show him to be

especially interested by Cooper’s teahcing on the brain, nerves, and the senses. interest in blood as mediator between psychological events and bodily expression.

What does Keats descrive poetry as in relation to men in the letters

“a friend to man”

WHat does Keats say of his ambitions in a letter written in Feb 1815 while under the apprenticeship with Hammond?

“I am ambitious of doing the world some good”

How does Keats persuade the parallel choice between poetry and sicence in letters from Late May 1819

“two poisons … Voyaging to and from India for a few years … leading a fevrous life alone with poetry”

Richardson - Keats poetics and cognition

2009 - “unprecedented poetics of embodied cognition”

De Almeida - Keats writing and life and blood

1991 - “He writes of life, but of life only as it can be proved upon the pulses”

Roe - how does Keats represent the world

1997 - “as a gigantic hospital, a global sickroom”

Roe - Keats poetry and observation

2013 - his poetry has the detail and freshness of actual scientific and medical observation

Roe - Keats imagining about the human body

2021 - “capable of imagining the aching physical life of the human body”

Give phrases from Hyperion describing the Titans after battle with the Olympian Gods that suggest Keats’ consideration of “the ahcing physical life of the human body” (Roe 2021)

‘palsied tongue’ ‘clenched teeth’ ‘Limbs/ locked up’ ‘sanguine feverous boiling gurgle of pulse’