Keats’s poetry emerged against ridicule and personal catastrophe

Evidence

Keats’s story is a particularly pitiable one. The son of a stable keeper, he lost his father in a riding accident when he was eight. He then nursed both his mother and his younger brother when they died of tuberculosis. He earned a license to work as an apothecary, but a small inheritance allowed him to abandon the trade and dive headlong into poetry. The work he managed to publish was roundly rejected and ridiculed. “It is a better and wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet,” advised Blackwood’s Magazine in a review. “So back to the shop Mr. John, back to ‘plasters, pills and ointment boxes.’ ” — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 397

Categorization

• CANDY: Blackwood’s telling a dying man to go back to being a druggist is a deliciously cringe historical zinger.
• XREF: connects to: A poet’s deepest pains can be radically severed from public and political experience — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 216

Related

• Keats’s obsession with death drove his poetic ambition (similarity 0.80)