ABSTRACT
John Keats was born in 1795, son to a manager of livery stables in Moorfields Pavement, London. His earliest literary work involved attempting a translation of the Aeneid as a schoolboy before he went on to apprentice as an apothecary-surgeon. Profoundly influenced by Elizabethan writers such as Edmund Spenser and Shakespeare, Keats ‘acknowledged Shakespeare not only as one of the greatest literary models but as his “good genius” guiding him in his own poetic enterprise’ (White: 7). This affinity for Shakespeare has been noted by John Middleton Murry, who argues, in the mode of Matthew Arnold’s ‘Essay on Keats,’ that Keats ‘was potentially, at least, our next greatest poet after Shakespeare and the only poet who is like Shakespeare’ (4). Keats abandoned his apprenticeship in 1815 to study at Guy’s Hospital, while also working on early poems. In 1816 he was licensed to work as an apothecary but left the profession to pursue his literary career.
