In January 1819 Keats took a much-needed vacation from London and spent a few days with some very good friends near the southern coast of England. As a relief from his taxing work on Hyperion, Keats set about writing a less ambitious, more romantic poem based on the legend of Saint Agnes' Eve (which falls on January 20). The result was one of Keats's greatest poems, The Eve of St. Agnes, and it marks the beginning of one of the most extraordinary productive periods in all of English literature. In less than nine months, from January to September, Keats produced an astonishing sequence of masterpieces: "La Belle Dame sans Merci," six great odes, "Lamia," and a group of magnificent sonnets. During the last few months of 1819 Keats went back to Hyperion, this time with a new vision of what his most ambitious undertaking could become.

But Keats's career was to be cut tragically short just as he was beginning to realize his full potential. I lie first clear signs of the tuberculosis he had always feared became apparent in February 1820. He weakened rapidly during the spring and summer. His close friend, the painter Joseph Severn, persuaded him to spend the fall and winter in Italy. But Keats had given up all hope of recovery. He died in Rome on February 23, 1821.

Keats's power as a poet comes from his remarkable ability to embody the complexity and concreteness of experience, and from the force and integrity of his character. He has always been known as a sensuous poet, and certainly his ability to appeal to the senses through language is virtually unrivaled. But there is much more to Keats than sensuousness. He is also a poet of ideas, of complicated and contradictory states of mind, and above all of deeply serious artistic enterprise - of what Matthew Arnold called "high and severe work." In contrast to most of his fellow Romantics, Keats sought to subordinate his own personality in his poetry and lo focus attention on the complex individuality of his subject. "A poet," he wrote, "is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence. . . . The sun, the moon, the sea and men and women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute - the poet has none; no identity. . .." He characterized the ideal poetic attitude as the capacity for forgetting oneself in a concentration on, or identification with, the subject of the poem. He called this attitude "Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." Yet despite his de-emphasizing the direct expression of the artist's conscious needs and values, Keats's own personality emerges very clearly in his poems, and especially in his letters, which are perhaps the most interesting of any English poet. In them we can see the deep connection between Keats's greatness as a poet and his greatness as a human being.