John Keats

John Keats (1795–1821) was one of the leading English Romantic poets, alongside Byron and Shelley, though he died of tuberculosis in Rome at just 25. He drafted Endymion — a 4,000-line retelling of the Greek myth of the shepherd loved by the moon goddess — in 1817, opening it with this line as its keynote. His reputation, modest in his lifetime, grew enormously after his death, resting on odes such as “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “To Autumn.”