This year marks the 200th anniversary of John Keats' astonishing creative breakthrough in 1819.
In the spring of that year, Keats wrote "Ode to Indolence,""Ode to Melancholy," "Ode to Psyche," "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and "Ode to a Nightingale."
That brilliant outburst followed "The Eve of St. Agnes" and "La Belle Dame sans Merci." The creative streak, among the greatest in English literature, began in the fall of 1818 with his uncompleted epic, "Hyperion: A Fragment."
In the fall of 1819, he capped his poetic run with what some consider the most perfect poem in the language, "To Autumn."
That ended Keats' career, except for the haunting poem to his love Fanny Brawne, "This Living Hand," written at the close of the year. Stricken by tuberculosis, and mentally beset by financial worries and his obsessioin with Brawne, Keats gave up poetry, the youthful renunciation as irrevocable and shocking as Rimbaud's.
In a desperate attempt to cure his tuberculosis, Keats traveled with his friend Joseph Severn to Italy. Keats died in Rome at age 25 in a small apartment overlooking the Spanish Steps, and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery.
Keats and his poems have been a touchstone for me since I discovered his life and work in college. Each year, I reread "Ode to a Grecian Urn," "Ode to a Nightingale" and "To Autumn." I've never considered the other odes on the same level, although I recently reread "Ode to Melancholy," which has some of the most beautiful lines in poetry.
Fairly obscure at the time of his death - he requested that the epithet "here lies one whose name was writ on water" be engraved on his tombstone - Keats is now considered the greatest poet of his era, his best poems rivaling Shakespeare's in their lyric mastery.
Keats' poetic outburst and tragic life influenced William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who abandoned their youthful poetry to write their deeply meditated novels.
Standing at Wentworth Place, Keats' home near Hampstead Heath where he wrote his 1819 poems, I could sense his presence. That outpouring of words and images came to him over a few months, then ceased. In the London spring 200 years ago, he wrote poems that have transcended time.