The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the Podglamorate Network and LIT Hub Radio.

Hello. He was born in humble circumstances, the son of a man who took care of horses at a London Inn, and he died in near obscurity.

We know him today as one of a handful of the greatest poets who ever lived.

John Keats gave up his burgeoning career as a physician to pursue what he believed

was a higher calling, a devotion to poetry, and somehow he managed

in the span of a few short years to write some of the most enduring masterpieces in the English

language, even as his death from tuberculosis at the age of 25,

eliminated the chance that he would ever share in the wealth or fame or glory that his success might have brought him.

We can blame his early death for that, but we may need to credit his early death as well.

He was a man who believed he would die young and perhaps that

awareness is what fueled his energy and brought into alignment the

intertwining themes love and death, beauty and death, poetry and death, life and death, that gave

his sensuous verses a depth of feeling and understanding that elevated him from the land of mere poetic

mortals to the heavenly firmament where he shines along with Shakespeare and Milton, Homer and Dante, Sappho and Virgil.

This is part two of our look at John Keats.

Last time I finished breathless and with my heart pounding I knew we still had a lot to cover

I didn't know if I was up to the task but here we go I'm back baby and we're going to dive into Jorge Luis Borjes on first reading Chapman's Homer,

Keats' poem that is, as well as his poem on reading King Lear and his general passion

for Shakespeare, including his famous letter on negative capability.

We'll take a harder look at Shelly and Byron and their attitudes toward Keats.

The savage reviews Keites received in his lifetime, his trip to Rome,

his two great loves, his death, and we will build all of this toward what might be his greatest poem,

...