John Keats and Negative Capability

The beauty of "the mystery."

Note: I will resume paid subscriptions tomorrow, and my posts are resuming today. Thank you for being here <3.

The Triumph of the Innocents // William Holman Hunt (Keats loved the Pre-Raphaelites)

I was forced to take a graduate-level course on British Romanticism, and for that I’m grateful. Before this class I knew of John Keats, having read two or three of his poems, but I now consider him one of my favorite writers and thinkers; not only for his poetry but also for his letters, comparable to the essays of any prominent writer.

Keats died young, on February 23, 1821, at twenty-five. Like his brother, whom he’d lost only two years earlier, he died of tuberculosis (called, in those days, consumption). His early death only makes the breadth of his work all the more remarkable. By his early twenties Keats had created a personal philosophy, informed by Shakespeare and Milton as well as his contemporaries— Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Hazlitt (amongst others).

Keats was unlike his …