One of the greatest of the Romantic poets, Keats was a passionate believer in Art and Beauty. He was born in 1795. 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, as in his ambitious long poem Endymion.

          Although most of his verse spans only four years – Keats died tragically young of tuberculosis in 1821 – his poetic development was astonishing. His poems range from the light-hearted and the satirical to the medieval stories, Isabella and The Eve of St Agnes, and the major odes: powerful meditations on love, art, song, sorrow and the natural world. Hyperion, the final poem in this selection, reaffirms his faith in progress and beauty.