October 1815: Keats’s Lodging as a Medical Student; Keats’s Interests in being a Poet
28 St. Thomas’s Street, London
Where, with Henry Stephens, Keats lives as medical student for a year-long course while at Guy’s Hospital—this is after having completed an apprenticeship of five years. He is registered for the course at Guy’s by 1 October. Keats must have been fairly serious about the medical profession: he opts for the year-long course rather than the six-month program also offered at Guy’s. Keats may also have been somewhat swayed by the ethos underpinning his training at Guy’s, one that acknowledges the idea of humanitarianism and charity in taking care of the ill, the injured, and the suffering.
Although Keats takes part in the life of student in the inner city, by around February we know that poetry also calls to him, and through into the summer he is still composing, as well as falling into a minor poetic grouping centered by George Felton Mathew.
Many from this period also recollect Keats’s literary interests, despite Keats being
a good
medical student—good enough, in fact, to be promoted for surgical dressership, which
were few
and highly valued. Some of his friends, however, will recall that Keats was not very
attentive
as a student; but at least one other (Charles
Brown) suggests that Keats was quite dedicated, at least initially, to his medical
studies, and Keats’s medical notebooks show at some vigor. During this time, he likely
composes the somewhat accomplished (and Wordsworthian) O Solitude, which is important inasmuch as it
gets published in Leigh Hunt’s Examiner, May 1816, marking Keats’s first time in print, and
also marking the first, albeit peripheral, entry into the Hunt circle. The published
poem is
signed J. K.
Stephens is himself interesting: he is a poet, chemist, doctor, inventor, and writer.
From
Stephens we learn, among other things, that Keats at the time is poetical enamoured
with Spenser and Byron, but not Pope, and that in seeing himself in print in The Examiner, and then in a brief piece that Hunt (in early December) writes about Keats and two other
up-and-coming Young Poets,
Keats decisively makes poetry his calling. Between these two
dates—May and December 1816—may, however, be the real turning point: Keats actually
meets Hunt
in October, and the two, as they say, hit it off; Keats is immediately launched into
Hunt’s
large, diverse, interesting, and supportive circle, mainly made up of poets, artists,
journalists, publishers, and scholars; and Hunt has another disciple. The rest is
literary
history.
