Want to feel bad about yourself? When John Keats died at the age of 25, he had already written some of the most important works not only in British Romanticism, but in all of English literature.

Keats was a tiny, sickly, poor young man, who gave up medicine for poetry (yeah, good trade there, Keats). He didn't let anything hold him back. He's most famous for writing a series of six "odes" which are considered to be among the greatest in English poetry. And he wrote them all in under a year.

The Complete Poems (1971)

In this collection, we'll find all of Keats' poetry, including the famous "odes" like "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn." We'll also find all of the big Romantic themes in these poems—from nature to the ancient past to the senses and the sublime. Don't miss out on Keats. He was young, but he sure knew a lot.

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Letters of John Keats to His Family and Friends (2011)

So Keats also loved writing letters. He wrote letters to his brothers, his friends, and to Fanny Brawne, the woman that he was in love with. And these letters are so beautiful and well-written that they're like works of art in themselves. They're also just really useful in giving us a sense of the life and times of the Romantic poets: who they hung out with, their writing habits, how they paid their bills (yeah, Romantic poets also had to pay bills, you know, and Keats had a hard time doing that).

Chew on This

John Keats (like other Romantics) just loved old, excavated stuff. In the poem "Ode on a Grecian Urn," the speaker finds a lot to consider in the the scenes painted on the side of an urn from ancient times.

Keats was pretty obsessed with nature (not surprising given that he's a Romantic). Check out these quotes about nature from his famous poem "Ode to a Nightingale."