John Keats was born on 31 October 1795 and was one of the second generation of English Romantic poets, alongside Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. His poems had been in print for less than four years when he died of tuberculosis on 23 February 1821, aged 25.
His work was indifferently received in his lifetime, but his fame grew rapidly after his death, and by the end of the century he was placed in the canon of English literature. His odes, among them “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, and his letters remain among the most widely read and studied in English.