John Keats (1795–1821) came from the least privileged background of all the major British poets. His father was head stableman at a London livery stable. The eldest of five children, Keats was an energetic, boisterous child. One of his teachers encouraged him to write and read poetry, including the work of Edmund Spenser.

At the age of fifteen, after the death of his parents, Keats was taken out of school and apprenticed to a surgeon and apothecary. Keats later qualified to study medicine but decided to pursue poetry instead. In part because he always believed he would die young, Keats worked with great urgency. At twenty-one, he published "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer." Soon afterward he began work on the epic poem Hyperion, modeled on Milton's Paradise Lost. Keats was concerned not to imitate other poets and steered away from friendship with Percy Shelley to avoid the latter's powerful poetic influence.

In 1818, Keats became mortally ill with tuberculosis; some people attributed his sickness to the criticism that he received in the literary press after publishing Hyperion. Despite his illness, Keats was extremely creative and prolific during the year that followed. He published a series of masterpieces, including his great odes and sonnets. Critics have compared his language to that of William Shakespeare because of its richness of detail and its celebration of existence.

Keats's respiratory illness intensified in 1820. A year later, he died in Rome at age twenty-five. His early death was a great tragedy, for we shall never know what his genius might have produced had he lived.