John Keats

John Keats (1795–1821) was an English Romantic poet. The son of a London stable keeper, orphaned young, he trained as a surgeon and apothecary before giving up medicine for poetry in 1816. His first volume and the long poem Endymion were harshly reviewed, but in the single year 1819 he wrote Lamia, The Eve of St. Agnes, Hyperion and the great odes, among them To a Nightingale, On a Grecian Urn and To Autumn. He nursed his brother Tom through tuberculosis, fell in love with Fanny Brawne, and died of the same disease in Rome at twenty-five. His letters rank with his verse.