Endymion

'A thing of beauty is a joy for ever': so begins Keats's first long poem, published in 1818. In four books, the shepherd-prince Endymion, who has dreamed of the moon goddess Cynthia, searches for her under the earth, beneath the sea and through the air, meeting other lovers on the way, until he learns how earthly and divine love meet.

Keats himself called the poem the work of an immature mind, and the hostile reviews that followed were later blamed, wrongly, for his early death. Its rich, rushing verse shows the poet he was becoming. For the mature Keats, turn to his Poems.

John Keats (1795–1821) was the son of a London stable keeper, lost both parents young, and trained as a surgeon at Guy's Hospital before giving up medicine for poetry. His first books were savagely reviewed, but in a few months of 1819, while nursing his grief for his brother Tom and in love with Fanny Brawne, he wrote the great odes.

Already ill with tuberculosis, he went to Rome hoping the climate would save him, and died there at twenty-five. His Poems and Endymion, together with his remarkable letters, made him one of the most loved poets in English.