John Keats - from Fool to Fulfilment

Part biography, part history, part literary commentary, this detailed account of the poetic development of John Keats takes the reader from the poet’s early childhood to the months just before his death.


In the autumn of 1820, John Keats, persuaded by his friends, set sail for Italy. Seriously ill with consumption, or tuberculosis, he clung to the hope that the warmer Mediterranean climate would be beneficial to his health. 


And after almost five weeks battling through violent storms and heavy seas, the Maria Crowther at last dropped anchor in the Bay of Naples. 


All on board were extremely weak and utterly exhausted, but Keats had perhaps suffered more than most. He had endured terrible bouts of seasickness on the voyage and his tuberculosis had worsened alarmingly. But his suffering did not end there: the Maria Crowther had sailed from London at a time of plague in the English capital, and the Neapolitan authorities, aware of that fact, imposed a ten day quarantine on all crew and passengers, preventing anyone from going ashore.


Those ten days provide the timescale for this narrative in which the young poet looks back on his life, tries to put his affairs in order and traces his emergence as the “youth elect”, the chosen one of his generation.


Keats began his writing career supported by a close circle of friends who were radical free-thinkers in matters of both politics and culture. They embraced the revolutionary ideas of Hermeticism so popular in London at the time, convinced that following Hermetic principles could bring about social, religious and political change.


Inspired by these new ideas and taking his lead from Spenser’s Faery Queene and Milton’s epic Paradise Lost, this is the story of John Keats told in Hermetic terms, revealing him not as a Romantic writer, but as a poet-hero in the Classical or Hermetic sense, one who feels compelled to undertake the quest, to explore the darker regions of the psyche, to venture into the dark caverns and forests of the soul and emerge victorious, having achieved true enlightenment.