John Keats
John Keats, (1795-1821). British poet. His parents died before he was 15 and his guardians apprenticed him to a surgeon. He gave up surgery in 1817 to write poetry, but his first volume, Poems (1817), had little success. In the same year he met Fanny Brawne, and they soon became engaged but never married. Almost all his great poems, including the odes `To a Nightingale’, ‘On a Grecian Urn’, and `To Melancholy’, the narrative poem `La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, and ‘Hyperion’, were written within the year 1819-20. When he began to show symptoms of tuberculosis, of which his brother had died, he sailed for Italy for his health (September 1820) but died shortly afterwards. He is buried in Rome.
