1795-1821 · English Romantic poet, author of the odes of 1819
About John Keats
John Keats (1795-1821) was an English Romantic poet, born in London, who trained at Guy's Hospital and qualified as an apothecary in 1816 before giving up medicine for poetry. In a few years he wrote Endymion, The Eve of St. Agnes and the great odes of 1819. He nursed his brother Tom through fatal tuberculosis in 1818, fell ill with the same disease, and died in Rome in February 1821 at the age of twenty-five.
written 1819; published 1820 · 19th Century · Poetry
In the Ode on a Grecian Urn Keats addresses an ancient vase carved with figures and asks what it can tell us that living speech cannot. The first stanza piles up names for the urn, a still unravished bride of quietness, a foster-child of silence and slow time, a sylvan historian, and then a rush of questions about the scene on its side: men or gods, reluctant maidens, mad pursuit, pipes and timbrels, wild ecstasy.