In John Keats’ poems, death crops up 100 times more than the future, a word that appears just once in the entirety of his work. This might seem appropriate on the 200th anniversary of the death of Keats, who was popularly viewed as the young Romantic poet “half in love with easeful death”.
Death certainly touched Keats and his family. At the age of 14, he lost his mother to tuberculosis. In 1818, he nursed his younger brother Tom as he lay dying of the same disease.
After such experiences, when Ludolph, the hero of Keats’ tragedy, Otho the Great, imagines succumbing to “a bitter death, a suffocating death”, Keats knew what he was writing about. And then, aged just 25, on February 23 1821, Keats himself died of tuberculosis in Rome.
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Wanted in Rome
23 Feb, 2021
Mary Wilsey
This is a tale of two young men who travelled to Rome and took up lodgings in Piazza di Spagna. One of them had tuberculosis and thought a winter in Rome might give him a longer lease on life. The other was there to accompany his sick friend but he also made the trip from London because he thought it would benefit his career as an artist and win him a Royal Academy scholarship.
They arrived in Rome in mid-November 1820 after a long journey by sea from London to Naples and then overland to Rome. Just over three months later, on 23 February 1821, John Keats died in a small room on the second floor of Piazza di Spagna 26 with only his friend Joseph Severn at his side. He was just 25. It was a difficult and lonely death.
Last modified on Mon 22 Feb 2021 11.55 EST
Almost 200 years ago, on 23 February 1821, the English poet John Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome at the age of 25. “I shall soon be laid in the quiet grave – thank God for the quiet grave,” he told his friend Joseph Severn, in whose arms he died. “I can feel the cold earth upon me – the daisies growing over me – O for this quiet – it will be my first.”
Keats gave instructions for his headstone to be engraved with the words “here lies one whose name was writ in water”, and visitors to Rome’s Protestant cemetery can still make a pilgrimage to see it today. But far from being “writ in water”, Keats’s words continue to echo, with a host of writing and events lined up to mark the 200th anniversary of his death.
Hampstead then was very rural and the brothers moved to get away from the fumes and noise of the city. Keats had seen a lot of suffering in his medical training and TB was a plague at that time affecting young people. His poetry seems very contemporary and close to our times now there is a plague affecting old people.
Keats took daily walks across the Heath, visiting poet and mentor Leigh Hunt in the Vale of Health where he took part in sonnet competitions with Shelley, his friend Charles Wentworth Dilke at Wentworth Place, and even a stroll with Highgate resident Samuel Taylor Coleridge who complained about the nightingales keeping him awake. Charles Brown lived in the other half of semi-detached Wentworth Place and invited Keats to live with him after Tom s death in December 1818. There he fell in love with neighbour Fanny Brawne and they became secretly engaged. Brown maintained that Keats composed his famous Ode to A Nightingale while sitting under a plum tree in t