In which year did John Keats die?

John Keats died in 1821. He died in Rome on 23 February 1821, aged only 25, after suffering from tuberculosis, then commonly called consumption.

Keats had trained as an apothecary-surgeon but abandoned medicine to pursue poetry. His major works, including “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and “To Autumn,” were written during a remarkably short literary career. His poetry was not widely celebrated during his lifetime, but his reputation grew rapidly after his death.

Keats travelled to Italy in 1820 in hopes that the warmer climate would improve his health. His friend Joseph Severn accompanied and nursed him in Rome. Keats was buried in the city’s Protestant Cemetery, where his gravestone bears the famous epitaph “Here lies One whose Name was writ in Water.”

A common mix-up is confusing Keats’s death year with those of other major English Romantic poets. Lord Byron died in 1824, while Percy Bysshe Shelley died in 1822. Keats’s early death helped shape the image of him as a brilliant, tragically short-lived Romantic poet.