Let’s face it, John Keats pretty much set the template for what we expect from Romantic poets – curly hair, brown eyes, a couple of passionate love affairs, sublime poetry (which was pretty much ignored in his own lifetime), and death from ‘consumption’ at just 25. No wonder he’s been the idol for teenage would-be poets ever since.
And he’s one of our own, a Londoner born and bred, his father being an ‘ostler’ (someone who looked after horses) at the stables of an inn called the ‘Swan and Hoop’, by the modern day Moorgate tube station. There is a pub there still, but the current one is from the early 19th century, called The Globe.
That’s why a new sculpture/memorial to the poet has recently been erected at the end of Moorfields where it fronts onto London Wall.
It is by the sculptor Martin Jennings (who did the statues of John Betjeman at St Pancras, George Orwell at Broadcasting House and Mary Seacole at St Thomas’s Hospital) and is an enlarged version of a ‘life mask’ of Keats from 1816 which has been cast in bronze.
This original work was done by the artist Benjamin Robert Haydon when the poet was 21 and Keats’s sister declared it ‘a perfect copy of the features of my dear brother’, so Jennings’s work can be viewed as a true likeness.
The mask is on a rather elegant and delicate stone plinth, and a slate base around this is inscribed with a quote from Keats’s 1819 ‘Ode to Indolence’.
My sleep had been embroider’d with dim dreams;
My soul had been a lawn besprinkled o’er
With flowers