Lest We Forget: John Keats and the War Poets

Today marks 100 years since the end of the First World War. On Armistice Day, we are grateful to share this post written by members of staff at Keats House in Hampstead to commemorate the centenary and mark the link between the War poets and John Keats. 

Commemorating Remembrance Sunday 2018 and the 100th anniversary of the Armistice at Keats House    

At Keats House, we observed the two-minute silence at 11am, along with people all over the world. It is particularly poignant that the 100th anniversary of the Armistice falls on Remembrance Sunday in 2018. And, for a war that is now beyond living memory and strongly evoked through its poetry, Keats House is a very significant place to show our respects and gratitude for the sacrifice of that particular generation, as well as those killed and those whose lives have been changed by other conflicts since. Keats himself lived in a time of international conflict but his life, works and legacy also inspired the poets of the First World War 100 years later. Wilfred Owen, one of the best known War poets, admired and was strongly influenced by Keats’s work.  He was killed in action in France on the 4 November 1918, at the age of just 25; the same age as Keats when he too died tragically young.Before the war began, Edward Thomas began writing a critical study of Keats and was encouraged to become a poet himself. His poems spoke of nature and the countryside, rather than the horror of war. He was killed in action on the first day of the Battle of Arras in April 1917. One year later, Edmund Blunden, who knew Keats House well, was staying in a room in Arras, where Thomas had been stationed.  There, he found Thomas’s book on Keats in a hole in the wall by his bed. As well as his own poems, Blunden went on to write about Keats and Owen and even wrote a short introduction to Keats House in our 1966 Visitor Guide. So, we know that Keats’s life, works and legacy directly inspired the poets of the First World War and hopefully gave respite to many more besides. Similarly the works of the War poets have helped shape and sustain the memory of that terrible conflict, an act of remembrance which is our duty and privilege to continue today and into the future. Before the two-minute silence began, we shared the thoughts above, and then this line from Wilfred Owen, written to his mother:

‘Do you know what will hold me together on a battlefield? The sense that I was perpetuating the language in which Keats and the rest of them wrote.’ 

Keats House also presented two free poetry readings on 11 November 2018, to share and appreciate the work of the War poets and to mark this hugely important day.