John Keats (1795-1821) On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, Ode on a Grecian Urn LINKS The Poetical Works of John Keats (1884) http://www.columbia.edu/acis/bartleby/keats/ Part of the Bartleby Archive created and maintained at Columbia University, this site contains the text of The Poetical Works of John Keats which was first published in 1884. The Web Concordances and Workbooks -- John Keats: The Odes of 1819 http://www.dundee.ac.uk/english/wics/newwics.htm This site contains two pages about Keats: One page includes the texts of six of his most famous odes and a concordance, an alphabetical index of the words used in his volume and the context in which they appear; the other page is a workbook which offers some themes with which to analyze his poems as well as some related links about Keats. BIOGRAPHY John Keats (1795–1821) Keats was born in London, the eldest son of a stablekeeper who died in an accident in 1804. His mother died of tuberculosis shortly after remarrying, and the grandmother who raised Keats and his siblings died in 1814. At eighteen, Keats wrote his first poem, "Imitation of Spenser," inspired by Edmund Spenser's long narrative poem The Faerie Queene. The thirty-three poems he wrote while training to be a surgeon were published in 1817, and Keats then gave up medicine for writing. After more traumatic losses in 1818, including the departure of one brother for America and the death of his other brother of tuberculosis, Keats wrote his second collection, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820). Ill with tuberculosis himself, Keats was sent to Rome to recover. He died at twenty-six, but despite his short career, he is a major figure of the romantic period.