John Keats

John Keats (1795 to 1821) was an English poet of the second generation of Romantic poets, who wrote alongside Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. His poems had been in print for less than four years when he died of tuberculosis at the age of 25, and they were received with indifference in his lifetime. His reputation grew quickly after his death, and by the end of the nineteenth century he stood in the canon of English literature. He is best known for a series of sensuous odes, among them Ode to a Nightingale and Ode on a Grecian Urn, and for the sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer. His medievalist poems, La Belle Dame sans Merci and The Eve of St. Agnes, strongly shaped the Pre-Raphaelite poets of the later Victorian era. His letters are still widely read and analysed.