John Keats was born in London, the eldest son of a man who managed a livery stable. His father died after a fall from a horse when John was eight, and his mother died of tuberculosis when he was fourteen. He was apprenticed to a surgeon and went on to train at Guy’s Hospital, qualifying to practice as an apothecary. But he had fallen in love with poetry, and at twenty-one he gave up medicine to write.

His first great poem came out of a single night. In October 1816, a friend lent him a translation of Homer by the Elizabethan poet George Chapman, and the two of them sat up reading it aloud until dawn. By ten that morning Keats had sent his friend the sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” which compares the feeling to an astronomer discovering a new planet.

Reviewers were cruel to his early books, mocking him as a lower-class upstart. Keats kept going. In the winter of 1818 he nursed his younger brother Tom through tuberculosis until Tom died. He moved in with a friend in Hampstead, and fell in love with Fanny Brawne, who lived next door. Then, in the spring of 1819, he wrote the great odes in a matter of weeks. A friend later remembered him writing “Ode to a Nightingale” under a plum tree in the garden one morning. “To Autumn” came that September, after a walk through the fields near Winchester.

Keats’s letters are as remarkable as his poems. In one, written to his brothers, he describes “Negative Capability,” the ability to remain “in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Writers still find that idea useful.

In February 1820 he coughed up blood and recognized it, as a medical man, for what it was. “That drop of blood is my death warrant,” he said. That autumn he sailed for Rome, hoping the warm climate would help, with his friend the painter Joseph Severn. He died there in February 1821, at twenty-five. Severn’s sketch of him on his deathbed survives. His grave, in Rome’s Protestant Cemetery, bears no name, only the line he asked for: “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.”