Life of John Keats

John Keats died at twenty-five, but his brief life burned with an intensity that continues to illuminate poetry nearly two centuries later. This Victorian biography, written by the eminent critic William Michael Rossetti, traces the arc of England's most tragic Romantic voice from humble beginnings as a surgeon's apprentice to his emergence as the poet who would redefine English verse. We follow Keats through the sudden deaths that marked his youth, his electrifying encounter with the literary world through Leigh Hunt, his passionate and doomed romance with Fanny Brawne, and his final journey to Rome in a desperate attempt to escape tuberculosis. Rossetti illuminates how suffering became the forge of Keats's genius, how the knowledge of his own mortality elevated his odes into something immortal. This is not merely a life of dates and publications but a portrait of an artist who transformed personal anguish into beauty so potent it still aches. For readers who have ever stood before a Grecian urn and wondered at the sorrow and wonder woven into language, this biography reveals the man behind the masterpieces.