Did the English Romantic poet John Keats steal bodies from graves? A closer look at some of the 19th-Century writer's most revered works, including his famous odes composed 200 years ago in the spring and summer of 1819, reveals an unsettling preoccupation with the feel of cemetery soil and the merging of self with cremated remains – a hands-on obsessiveness that goes beyond an anxious awareness of one's own mortality. It is almost as if the poet is cryptically confessing to something dark, dangerous, and deeply disquieting.
It is no secret that Keats was intensely fascinated with dying and that, for him, death was a soulful state towards which his spirit tended. Throughout his poetry, death is invoked as an object of infatuation. He memorably admits in his Ode to a Nightingale that “for many a time” he has been “half in love with easeful death”, to whom he sweetly whispers “soft names in many a mused rhyme”. “Now more than ever,” Keats concludes, “seems it rich to die,/To cease upon the midnight with no pain”.
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