John Keats

John Keats (1795–1821), son of a London livery stable keeper, trained as an apothecary-surgeon at Guy's Hospital before abandoning medicine entirely to devote his short life to pure poetry. Brutally savaged by contemporary Tory critics in *Blackwood's Magazine* as a member of the 'Cockney School', Keats developed a concept he called *Negative Capability*—the capacity of an artist to exist in uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts without irritable reaching after fact and reason.

Between spring and autumn of 1819, living in Hampstead while desperately in love with his neighbor Fanny Brawne, Keats achieved one of the most astonishing creative flowerings in world literature, composing his six monumental Great Odes in a span of months: Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode on Melancholy, Ode to Psyche, Ode on Indolence, and To Autumn. Diagnosed with tuberculosis, he sailed to Rome where he died in a small room beside the Spanish Steps at twenty-five, asking that his tombstone bear no name, only: 'Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.'