Joseph Severn s c1845 painting of Keats on Hampstead Heath
Credit: Granger/Alamy
“Cabin’d, cribb’d, confined” is how Macbeth describes being mentally shut-in when his plans fail. It is how John Keats, too, must have felt when making his final journey on a small ship to Italy in 1820, and then being quarantined on board in Naples harbour for 10 days in November that year. (At least Keats’s incarceration was for only a week and three days. Our collective quarantine is rather longer than that, with no clear end in sight.) A few months later, on February 23 two hundred years ago, the poet would die in Rome. He was only 25 years old.