John Keats

John Keats, born October 31, 1795, in London, was an English poet and one of the central figures of the second generation of Romantic poets, alongside Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Trained initially as a surgeon-apothecary, he abandoned medicine to devote himself to poetry, publishing his first collection in 1817 before entering the extraordinarily productive period that defined his short career.

Keats is best remembered for his «Great Odes» of 1819, including «Ode to a Nightingale» and «Ode on a Grecian Urn», alongside narrative and lyric poems such as «The Eve of St. Agnes», «La Belle Dame sans Merci», «Lamia», and «Isabella, or the Pot of Basil». His poetry is distinguished by sensuous, richly detailed imagery, a musical command of language often described as a silken or silver-tongued style, and a preoccupation with beauty, mortality, and transience. His concept of «negative capability» — the ability to dwell in uncertainty without reaching after fact or reason — became a lasting influence on later poetic thought.

Keats died of tuberculosis on February 23, 1821, in Rome at just 25 years old, having received little critical recognition in his lifetime. His posthumous reputation grew enormously over the following decades, and he is now regarded as one of the most important and widely studied poets in the English language, his brief body of work continuing to shape ideas about lyric poetry and Romanticism.