John Keats’s epitaph reads, “Here lies One whose Name was writ in Water.” Keats died in Rome on 23 February 1821 and was buried in the city’s Protestant Cemetery, now known as the Non-Catholic Cemetery.
The words express his fear that his name and poetry would quickly disappear, since he had achieved limited public recognition during his short life. Keats had asked for a gravestone without his name or date, but his friends Joseph Severn and Charles Armitage Brown added the epitaph and further lines after his death. The stone also bears a relief of a lyre with broken strings.
The epitaph is often presented as proof that Keats died believing himself a failure, but that interpretation is incomplete. His reputation grew rapidly after his death, helped by works such as “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “To Autumn.” Percy Bysshe Shelley memorialised him in the elegy Adonais, another reason the two poets are sometimes confused in questions about Keats’s grave.