One of the greatest of the Romantic poets, Keats was a passionate believer in Art and Beauty. A liberal in his views, Keats lived during a time of political unrest, and his poetry is often indirectly critical of the conventional political, religious and sexual beliefs that governed his society.

Although most of his poetry spans only four years his poetic development was rapid. His poems range from the light-hearted and the satirical to the major odes: powerful meditations on love, art, song, sorrow and the natural world. His last poems reflect Keats's distraught and confused feelings towards Fanny Brawne to whom he was engaged. He was still a young man when he died of tuberculosis in 1821, and on his tombstone he asked to be inscribed 'Here lies one whose name was writ on water'.