John Keats was one of the great Romantic poets, a fact all the more surprising considering that he died at the age of 25. In fact, his career as a poet lasted only the last six years of his life, and he was published only in the last four of those. In those years, he wrote such works as “Ode to a Nightingale”, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, and “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”, and was a massive influence on generations of writers and poets who followed him.
Keats developed tuberculosis in Rome, coughing up blood from February 1820 until his death a year later, and was buried in Rome’s Protestant Cemetery. His friend, admirer and fellow Romantic poet, Percy Shelley, would be buried there also some sixteen months later.
