Today, dear reader, we pour some out for John Keats, one of the greats of the Romantic movement.  Keats kicked the bucket on February 23, 1821 – 204 years ago today.  He was 25, a punk kid by today’s standards, but he’d already scribbled some of the most gut-punching lines in English lit. The cause?  Tuberculosis, that slow, coughing bastard of a disease that chewed through the 19th century like a plague with a personal grudge.  Back then, they called it “consumption.”  Which sounds poetic as hell – fitting for a guy like Keats – but it was anything but.  He’d been coughing up blood for over a year, a dire sign that his lungs were shredding themselves.  His doctors, in true old-school fashion, tried giving him a good bleeding – because why not drain a dying man’s strength? – and stuck him on a starvation diet.  By the time he got to Rome, hoping the warm air might save him, he was a ghost already.  He died in a cramped room overlooking the Spanish Steps, with his buddy Joseph Severn holding his hand, listening to him rasp, “I am dying – I shall die easy; don’t be frightened.”  Balls of steel, even at the end.  The details are grim but magnetic.  Keats didn’t just fade; he fought The Reaper tooth and nail.  He’d been sick since at least 1820, probably caught it nursing his brother Tom through the same damn disease in 1818.  Karma’s a bitch – Tom died, and John got tagged next.  In Rome, his final days were a fevered haze: he couldn’t stomach food, his voice was shot, and he was pissed – told Severn to ditch the sappy letters from his fiancée, Fanny Brawne, because they tore him up too much.  His tombstone doesn’t even bear his name, just “Here lies one whose name was writ in water,” a line he picked himself.  He figured the world wouldn’t remember him.  He was wrong.

So where does Keats stack up among the Romantic Poets?  He’s the dark horse, the scrappy underdog who punches way above his weight.  You’ve got Wordsworth and Coleridge, the old guard, pontificating about nature and dope-addled visions; Shelley, the rebel atheist spitting fire at the gods; and Byron, the rockstar aristocrat boning his way across Europe.  Then there’s Keats: poor, orphaned, trained as a surgeon, no fancy pedigree – writing odes that hit you like a blade to the chest.  He wasn’t about grand manifestos or epic quests; he zeroed in on beauty, mortality, and the pain of being alive.  “Ode to a Nightingale,” “To Autumn,” “Bright Star” – sure, they look like poems, but they’re really existential Molotov cocktails.  He’s the Romantic who makes you feel the weight of your own heartbeat, while the others are busy shouting from mountaintops.
Keats didn’t get the rockstar treatment in his lifetime – critics called his stuff “cockney” and sneered at his low-rent roots – but he rewrote the game after he was gone.  Tennyson, Yeats, even the modernists like Eliot owe him a nod.  His idea of “negative capability” – embracing doubt and mystery without chasing answers – still rattles cages in lit theory.

Keats died young, broke, and lovesick, but he left a stash of words that still draw blood.  Cheers.

N.P.: “Lullaby” – Pure Obsessions & Red Nights