La Belle Dame Sans Merci - Keats Blog Tour

In the Georgette Heyer novels I love so much there are several mentions of the dangerous Lord Byron, but he had several contemporaries, known as the Romantic Poets, not all of whom had Byron’s entrée to ton society.  One such was John Keats (1795-1821), humbly born, and orphaned relatively young.  He took up medicine as a career, but his love of beauty and literature had found expression in poetry by his late adolescence.  Inspired by Spenser’s Faerie Queen, he entered “a new world of bright colour and honied language, of romantic adventure and chivalric devotion far above the level of actual life,” according to one biographer, Aileen Ward, and wrote his first poem.  

Keats' first poem was published in 1816, and my favorite, La Belle Dame San Merci, was written in 1819, early in his sadly short career (just two years later, he died of tuberculosis, the family disease).