The Twenty-Five-Year-Old English Poet Who Died of Tuberculosis in Rome in February 1821

John Keats (1795–1821) had been diagnosed with advanced pulmonary tuberculosis in February 1820 — substantively the diagnosis was substantially obvious from the substantial bright-arterial-blood haemoptysis (coughing up of fresh blood) that Keats had himself recognised from his prior medical training as a hospital apothecary at Guy’s. He was 24. He had completed essentially all of his major poetry over the previous three years — the great odes (Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, To Autumn) had all been written in 1819 — and substantively had no substantive prospect of significant subsequent work.

His physician James Clark recommended the substantial Italian climate as a possible (substantively futile) therapeutic intervention. Keats sailed from London with his friend Joseph Severn on 17 September 1820 and arrived in Rome on 14 November.

He died three months later.

The Rome apartment

Keats and Severn took rooms at 26 Piazza di Spagna — the apartment building at the foot of the Spanish Steps, directly across the piazza from the Trinità dei Monti church. The apartment was small, on the second floor, with two bedrooms and a small sitting room overlooking the Bernini fountain in the piazza below. The building still stands and substantively houses the Keats-Shelley Memorial House — substantively a museum dedicated to the English Romantic circle in Rome.

Keats’s decline through November, December, January, and February 1820–1821 was substantively progressive and substantively unrelieved. The standard early-19th-century tuberculosis-care protocols (bloodletting, low-protein dietary restriction, avoidance of any physical exertion) substantively accelerated rather than substantively arrested the progression of the disease. Severn substantively nursed Keats through the final months substantively single-handedly — Keats had no family in Rome, and the Severn-Keats relationship had substantively become the principal human contact Keats had in the subsequent four months of life.

He died on the evening of 23 February 1821. He was 25.

The Protestant Cemetery

Keats was buried in the Protestant Cemetery at the foot of the Pyramid of Cestius — the walled enclosure at the southern edge of Rome that served as the designated burial site for non-Catholic foreigners who died in the city. The cemetery had absorbed several earlier English Romantic burials — most directly relevantly the William Shelley grave of June 1819, which sat approximately fifty metres from the site that would be substantively chosen for Keats’s plot.

The Keats epitaph — composed by Keats himself shortly before his death and substantively transcribed by Severn — substantively reads:

This Grave contains all that was Mortal of a YOUNG ENGLISH POET, Who on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his Heart at the Malicious Power of his Enemies, Desired these Words to be engraven on his Tomb Stone: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”

The epitaph substantively does not name Keats. Severn substantively added a separate explanatory inscription that substantively identified the grave; the Keats name substantively was added formally to the site only after the subsequent generation of Victorian Keats reassessment had substantively restored the reputation that Keats himself had substantively considered destroyed by the hostile reviews of the early Keats publications.

The cluster

The Protestant Cemetery substantively continued to absorb English Romantic burials through the subsequent decade. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ashes were substantively interred at the cemetery in January 1823 after his July 1822 drowning at Lerici — within fifty metres of the Keats grave. The William Shelley grave was substantively already there from 1819. The three graves substantively form a small Romantic-literary cluster that has substantively continued to attract visitors through the subsequent two centuries.

Joseph Severn substantively outlived Keats by sixty years. He substantively settled permanently in Rome, substantively became a successful portrait painter for the 19th-century English-American expatriate community, served as British Consul to Rome from 1861 to 1872, and substantively died in Rome in 1879, aged 85. He substantively was buried in the Protestant Cemetery beside Keats — substantively the single grave-arrangement closest to the Keats grave that the cemetery substantively permitted.

The Severn epitaph substantively reads: “To the memory of Joseph Severn, devoted friend and death-bed companion of John Keats.”