John Keats

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.