Along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats is considered one of the most important figures in the second generation of English Romantic poets. Born on Halloween in 1795, John Keats lived a very short life, dying at the age of twenty-five from tuberculosis. In 1814 John Keats began an apprenticeship with Thomas Hammond, a surgeon and apothecary and by 1816 had achieved his apothecary's license, which allowed him to practice medicine....

One of the greatest English poets, John Keats (1795–1821) created an astonishing body of work before his early death from tuberculosis at the age of 26. Much of his poetry consists of deeply felt lyrical meditations on a variety of themes-love, death, the transience of joy, the impermanence of youth and beauty, the immortality of art, and other topics-expressed in verse of exquisite delicacy, originality, and sensuous richness. This collection contains...

The arrangement of the poems, in eight sections, is intended to show the general development of Keats as a poet, while at the same time grouping, as far as possible, those poems that are related to one another in form or in theme. Excerpts from the letters of Keats are distributed throughout the text where they are pertinent.