ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -Today marks the day in 1821 when John Keats, the Romantic poet who waxed on Grecian urns and nightingales, succumbed to tuberculosis. He was only 25. John was thought to have contracted the infection while taking care of his critically ill brother Tom, who died in 1819.

Detailed explanation-2: -John Keats, one of the greatest romantic poets, died at 25 from tuberculosis. And yet, death at a tender age could not rob John Keats of his immortality. His verses such as Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, La Belle Dame sans Merci and On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer are considered to be eternal.

Detailed explanation-3: -Keats, himself a Londoner, first encountered TB when he was 14 and his mother died of consumption.

Detailed explanation-4: -The story goes that in early February of 1820 he caught a fever and had a haemorrhage-coughed up blood-and by virtue of his medical training, Keats deemed this was arterial blood, thus signifying what he construed as his ‘death-warrant’.

Detailed explanation-5: -John Keats was born in London on 31 October 1795, the eldest of Thomas and Frances Jennings Keats’s four children. Although he died at the age of twenty-five, Keats had perhaps the most remarkable career of any English poet. He published only fifty-four poems, in three slim volumes and a few magazines.