CGI wizardry brings poet John Keats back to life 200 years after his death euronews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from euronews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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
Glowing to receive a thousand guests : launch of The Poetry Society s Keats200 programme – The Poetry Society poetrysociety.org.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from poetrysociety.org.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.