• When John was eight years old, his father was killed in an accident.
• In 1810 his mother died of consumption, leaving the children to their grandmother.
• The grandmother put them under the care of two guardians, to whom she made over a respectable amount of money for the benefit of the orphans.
• Under the authority of the guardians, he was taken from school to be an apprentice to a surgeon.
• In 1814 John became a hospital student in London.
• Under the guidance of his friend Cowden Clarke he devoted himself increasingly to literature.
• In 1814 Keats finally sacrificed his medical ambitions to a literary life.
• In May 1816, Hunt helped him publish his first poem in a magazine.
• In 1817 he went on a hiking tour to Scotland and Ireland with his friend Charles Brown.
• The first signs of his own fatal disease – consumption - forced him to return prematurely.
• In London, he moved to Hampstead Heath, where he lived in the house of Charles Brown.
• Despite his illness and his financial difficulties, Keats wrote a tremendous amount of great poetry during 1819, including "La Belle Dame sans Merci" ("The Beautiful Lady without Pity")
• He wrote the poem on April 21, 1819. It appears in the course of a letter to his brother George.
• Shortly before the poem was written, Keats recorded a dream in which he met a beautiful woman in a magic place which turned out to be filled with pallid, enslaved lovers.
• In 1820 an unmistakeable sign of consumption marked the beginning of what he called his "posthumous life".
• In the late summer of 1820, Keats was ordered by his doctors to avoid the English winter and move to Italy.
• John Keats died in Rome on the 23rd of February, 1821.
• He is buried on the Protestant Cemetery with the following lines engraved on his tombstone: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water."
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