John Keats

John Keats was an English poet from the second generation of Romantic poets. He was born on October 31, 1795, and died on February 23, 1821. When he died at age 25, he had been writing poems for less than four years. During his life, people didn't care much about his works, but after he died, his fame grew quickly. By the end of the century, he was included in the canon of English literature. He had a big impact on many writers of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and the Encyclopedia Britannica...See more

John Keats was an English poet from the second generation of Romantic poets. He was born on October 31, 1795, and died on February 23, 1821. When he died at age 25, he had been writing poems for less than four years. During his life, people didn't care much about his works, but after he died, his fame grew quickly. By the end of the century, he was included in the canon of English literature. He had a big impact on many writers of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1888 called one of his odes "one of the final masterpieces." Jorge Luis Borges said that his first meeting with Keats was something he would remember for the rest of his life. Keats' style, especially in the series of odes, was "heavily loaded with sensualities." Like most Romantics, he used images from nature to show how strong his feelings were. His poems and letters, like "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Sleep and Poetry," and "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," are still some of the most popular and studied pieces of English literature today. See less