John Keats

(1795 - 1821)

Maligned by his contemporaries as one of the “cockney” poets because he had been born the son of a livery stable keeper, John Keats went on to publish fifty-four poems, among them Endymion, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and “Ode to a Nightingale.” One autumn evening several weeks before his twenty-first birthday in 1816, Keats was introduced to George Chapman’s translation of Homer by a friend; at ten o’clock the next morning, the friend received “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” considered among the finest English sonnets. He toured the Lake District in 1818, during which time signs of tuberculosis manifested, and by 1820 he had difficulty writing because of the disease. He died in Rome at the age of twenty-five in 1821.