"Something about John Keats" by Lavinia Capogna

"Something about John Keats" by Lavinia Capogna 

"The world has treated me badly ... though I have treated it very well."

"Is there such a thing as another life? Will I wake up and find that all this is a dream? It has to exist ... we cannot have been created for this kind of suffering"

"I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections, and the truth of imagination" 

"A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:

its loveliness increases; it will never

pass into nothingness."

John Keats (England 1795 - Italy 1821) was one of the world's greatest poets and of English Romanticism. He was born into a poor family, managed to study and became passionate about poetry, was friends with Shelley and met Byron. 

While still a child he lost his parents and took great care of his brother, who was ill with tuberculosis. He also fell ill and at that time there was no cure for tuberculosis. 

At the age of 23 he met Fanny Brawne. They lived in the same house, she with her mother. A great platonic love was born between them. For her Keats wrote "Bright Star," one of the most beautiful love poems ever written. 

At that time he also composed wonderful lyrics such as "Ode to a Greek Urn," "La belle dame sans merci," and "To Autumn." 

When he was 25, his doctors recommended a stay in Italy, and together with the painter Joseph Severn he left for Rome, where he stayed in a guesthouse on the Spanish Steps (now the Keats and Shelley House). Despite the efforts of Severn, Giorgio Rea, a wealthy neighbor who offered to pay his expenses, and his British doctor his condition worsened. 

Just days before Keats died a misunderstood English critic panned his poetic work, which brought him no little grief. 

The poet rests in Rome's non-Catholic cemetery, known as the Cemetery of the English, in the shadow of the Cestia Pyramid.

On the tombstone is not his name but an epitaph he himself had dictated:

"Here lies a poet whose name is written on water."