Which Romantic poet wrote 'Ode to a Nightingale'?

John Keats wrote “Ode to a Nightingale.” The poem is one of his major 1819 odes and explores beauty, mortality, imagination, and the desire to escape human suffering through the nightingale’s song.

Keats may have composed it in the garden of Wentworth Place in Hampstead, where a nightingale had nested near the house he shared with Charles Armitage Brown. Brown later recalled that Keats drafted the poem in a single morning, though the exact composition date and location remain uncertain. It was published in the July 1819 issue of Annals of the Fine Arts.

The poem is often grouped with Keats’s other great odes, including “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “To Autumn.” A common mix-up is attributing it to Percy Bysshe Shelley, another prominent second-generation Romantic poet; Shelley wrote “To a Skylark,” while Keats made the nightingale the central bird in this famous ode.