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Keats’s Premature Death: The Tragic End of a Romantic Poet

“Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.” — Keats’s self-chosen epitaph, 1821

The death of John Keats at the age of twenty-five, on February 23, 1821, in a small room in the Piazza di Spagna in Rome, is one of the great tragic events of the Romantic age. Keats’s death, and the long illness that preceded it, became one of the foundational myths of Romanticism — the brilliant young poet cut off in the full flood of his talent, the dark irony of his epitaph, and the long literary afterlife of his image as the doomed poet of beauty.

The Illness

Keats had been in poor health for some years before his death. He had suffered from a series of severe sore throats, and in early 1820 he had a major hemorrhage of the lungs. The diagnosis of tuberculosis, the “consumption” that had killed his mother and his brother Tom, was confirmed later in the year.

The illness progressed rapidly. In September 1820, on the advice of his friends, Keats left England for Italy, in the hope that the warmer climate might help. He traveled with the painter Joseph Severn, who would be with him to the end. They arrived in Rome in November 1820, and Keats was installed in a small house on the Piazza di Spagna, now the Keats-Shelley House museum.

The Last Months

The last months of Keats’s life were marked by increasing illness, increasing depression, and the composition of some of his most poignant late poems. The sonnet “Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art” — one of the great sonnets in the language — was composed in October 1820, the night before he left for Italy. The fragmentary verse and prose of the last weeks show Keats still struggling with his art, still reaching for the great works he would never complete.

In January 1821, Keats began to suffer from severe stomach pains that prevented him from eating or sleeping. By the end of the month, he was bedridden and was receiving care from Severn and the physician Dr. James Clark. On February 23, 1821, he died quietly in Severn’s arms. His last words, Severn recalled, were a confession of the cause of his death: “I feel the flowers growing over me.”

The Funeral and the Epitaph

The funeral of Keats took place on February 27, 1821, in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. Severn and the other friends who were present placed a sheet over the body, which Severn painted from a few days later, producing one of the great portraits of the Romantic age. The body was buried beneath a tombstone that bore no name — only the epitaph Keats had composed himself: “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.”

The absence of a name was a deliberate gesture on Keats’s part. He had been deeply hurt by the reviews of his earlier work, especially the savage attacks by the Tory Quarterly Review and the Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. He had written to a friend that he would “annihilate” himself; the unnamed grave was, in part, an expression of this wish for self-effacement.

The Long Literary Afterlife

The story of Keats’s death became one of the foundational myths of Romanticism. Shelley’s great pastoral elegy Adonais (1821), written in the months after Keats’s death, helped establish the image of Keats as the martyr-poet, cut off in the flower of his youth. Severn’s portrait of Keats on his deathbed, and his long life as the keeper of the Keats memory, helped perpetuate the myth. The nineteenth-century critical tradition — from the early Victorian essayists to the Pre-Raphaelites to the late Victorian aesthetes — developed the image of Keats as the supreme poet of beauty, the martyr to his own art.

The image of the doomed young poet of beauty became a central element of the broader Romantic myth of the artist, and has shaped the way we think about the artist-genius from the early nineteenth century to the present. The page on The Romantic Hero treats this larger tradition in more detail.

The Late Works

The works that Keats produced in the last years of his life — the great odes of 1819, the unfinished Hyperion, the late sonnets, and the fragmentary last pieces — are among the supreme achievements of English lyric poetry. The great odes, treated in detail in our page on Romantic Odes, are remarkable for their compression, their dense musical texture, their balance of feeling and thought, and their ability to make a single moment of perception open onto the largest questions of human life. The Hyperion fragments, the great Fall of Hyperion: A Dream, and the late sonnets are major works of the English poetic tradition.

How to Read Keats

The best way to read Keats is to begin with the great odes of 1819 — the “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on Melancholy,” “Ode on Indolence,” and “To Autumn” — and to follow with the sonnets, the long poems (Endymion, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes), the unfinished Hyperion, and the letters. The letters in particular are among the great documents of English Romanticism, full of the poet’s thinking about art, beauty, mortality, and the human condition.