8 Beautiful Quotes From John Keats' Letters

John Keats only lived until the age of 25, but in that time he penned such immortal poems as "Ode on a Grecian Urn" ("She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, / For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!") and "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer" ("Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold").

Keats also lived in what John Barnard, in his introduction to his new edition of John Keats: Selected Letters (Penguin), calls "a period of great letter-writing," and appropriately his elegant wordsmithing was not confined to the stanzas of his poetry. Throughout his 20s, Keats carried on extensive correspondence, and his letters not only contain snippets of his poetry, in-progress and completed, the letters themselves bear the hallmarks of his passionate and lyrical style.

Barnard, the editor of the new volume, selected the following quotes as some of the most inspiring and thrilling from the great poet's correspondence:

(To J. H. Reynolds, 18 April 1817)


(To Benjamin Bailey, 22 Nov. 1817)


(To Benjamin Bailey, 22 Nov. 1817)

(To J. H. Reynolds, 19 Feb. 1818)


(To Benjamin Bailey, 13 March 1818)

(To his brother and sister-in-law, 19 March 1819)

(To Fanny Brawne, May [?] 1820)


(To Fanny Brawne, August 1820)