John Keats

John Keats was a livery-stable keeper’s son who trained as a surgeon, gave it up for poetry at twenty-one, was savaged by the reviews, nursed his brother through tuberculosis and caught it, and died in Rome at twenty-five, asking that his gravestone say here lies one whose name was writ in water. In one year, 1819, he wrote the great odes, on a nightingale, a Grecian urn, melancholy and autumn, The Eve of St Agnes, Lamia and the Hyperion fragments. The letters, on negative capability and the vale of soul-making, are read beside the poems. No English poet did more in less time.