John Keats
English Romantic poet (1795–1821)
John Keats (31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821) was an English poet of the second generation of Romantic poets, along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. His poems had been in publication for less than four years when he died of tuberculosis at the age of 25. They were indifferently received in his lifetime, but his fame grew rapidly after his death. By the end of the century, he was placed in the canon of English literature, strongly influencing many writers of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; the Encyclopædia Britannica of 1888 described his "Ode to a Nightingale" as "one of the final masterpieces".
Keats had a style "heavily loaded with sensualities", notably in the series of odes. As was typical of the Romantics, he accentuated extreme emotion through natural imagery. Today his poems and letters remain among the most popular and analysed in English literature – in particular "Ode to a Nightingale", "Ode on a Grecian Urn", "Sleep and Poetry" and the sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer". Jorge Luis Borges named his first time reading Keats an experience he felt all his life.
In the later Victorian era, Keats's medievalist poems, such as "La Belle Dame sans Merci" and "The Eve of St. Agnes", were a major influence on the Pre-Raphaelite movement, inspiring poets such as Algernon Charles Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and William Morris.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q82083. VIAF identifies the subject as 66508882. The Library of Congress control number is n80035884. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1795, 1821 and 1888.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Keats” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.