Poetry s Bright Star — 200 Years Later John Keats Shines On towntopics.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from towntopics.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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.
Tuesday 23 February 2021, 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm Free
On February 23 1821, a young English poet died of TB in Rome. Uncelebrated by the literary establishment during his lifetime, John Keats is today one of English literature’s most beloved figures, famed for the beauty of his poems, his lively, philosophical correspondence and the ineffable poignancy of his short life.
Two hundred years to the day after Keats’ death, The Poetry Society welcomes a circle of poets and Keats scholars to reflect on his enduring place in our literary imaginations in an evening of poetry, thought and discussion.
L-R: Ruth Padel, Nicholas Roe, Will Harris, Lucasta Miller, Sarah Wootton, Richard Marggraf Turley, Rachael Boast, Laila Sumpton