English · 1795–1821
John Keats died of tuberculosis at twenty-five, leaving behind one of the most concentrated bodies of work in English poetry. The 1819 odes — "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "To Autumn," "Ode on Melancholy" — were composed in a single year and remain the high-water mark of Romantic lyric. His letters, particularly on "negative capability," shaped how poets after him thought about poetry itself.