John Keats: How His Poems of Death and Lost Youth Are Resonating During COVID-19

A portrait of John Keats (1822) by William Hilton, after Joseph Severn. Keats lost most of his family members to tuberculosis, the disease that would eventually take his own life on Feb. 23, 1821. Public Domain

In John Keats’s poems, death crops up 100 times more than the future, a word that appears just once in the entirety of his work. This might seem appropriate on the 200th anniversary of the death of Keats, who was popularly viewed as the young Romantic poet “half in love with easeful death.”