John Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome at twenty-five — and in that brief span wrote enough to be ranked alongside Byron and Shelley. "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode to a Nightingale," "To Autumn": poetry in which every word sits exactly where it should.
He was born in London in 1795. His father died early; his mother was carried off by tuberculosis. Keats trained as an apothecary and qualified as a surgeon — then gave up medicine for poetry.
The critics savaged him at first. Shelley would later write "Adonais," an elegy on Keats's death that laid the blame at the critics' door. Keats himself took the attacks more calmly.
Fanny Brawne was the woman he loved and never lived to marry. He went to Rome to die. His gravestone bears, at his own request, the words: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water."