John Keats trained as a surgeon, abandoned medicine for poetry, produced "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," and some of the most beautiful lines in the English language, and died of tuberculosis in Rome at twenty-five. His epitaph reads "Here lies One whose Name was writ in Water" — the self-assessment of a poet who believed he had failed, written by a man whose name turned out to be carved in stone.
This episode traces Keats from his London stable-keeper origins through the surgical training, the extraordinary eighteen months of poetic production, and the Roman death that ended English literature's most concentrated burst of genius.
Keats's working-class origins and the surgical apprenticeship he abandoned for poetry
The annus mirabilis of 1819 — the odes, the letters, and eighteen months of unmatched creation
The tuberculosis diagnosis, the journey to Rome, and the death at twenty-five
The epitaph "writ in Water" and the posthumous fame that proved him spectacularly wrong
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