2010年诗歌选读第四讲补充材料.docVIP

2010年诗歌选读第四讲补充材料 March, 2010 Part I Introduction about John Keats 1817: Poems, Keats’ first book. 1818: Endymion: A Poetic Romance. 1819: Keats’s annus mirablis, in which he writes almost all his great poems. 1820: Publishes the volume Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other poems. No major poet has had a less propitious origin. John Keats’s father was a head stableman at a London livery stable; he married his employer’s daughter and inherited the business. Mrs. John Keats, by all reports, was a strongly sensual woman and a rather casual but affectionate mother to her five children—John (the first born), his three brothers (one of whom died in infancy), and a sister. Keats was sent to the Reverend John Clarke’s private school at Enfield, where he was a noisy, high-spirited boy; despite his small stature (when full-grown, he was barely over five feet in height), he distinguished himself in skylarking and fistfights. Here he had the good fortune to have a teacher Charles Cowden Clarke, son of the head master, who later became a writer and editor; he encouraged Keats’s passion for reading and, both at school and in the course of their later friendship, introduced him to Spenser and other poets, to music, and to the theatre. When Keats was eight his father was killed by a fall from a horse, and when he was fourteen his mother died of tuberculosis. Although the livery stable had prospered, and ￡8,000 had been left in trust to the children by Keats’s grandmother, the estate remained tied up in the law courts for all of Keats’s lifetime. The children’s guardian, Richard Abbey, was an unimaginative and practical-minded businessman; he took Keats out of school at the age of fifteen and bound him apprentice to Thomas Hammond, a surgeon and apothecary at Edmonton. In 1815 Keats carried on his medical studies at Guy’s Hospital, London, and the next year qualified to practice as an apothecary-surgeon—but almost immediately, over his guardian’s protests, he abandoned med