ABSTRACT
That John Keats died in 1821 in a Roman lodging house at Piazza di Spagna 26, unrecognised save by a few passionately believing and loyal friends, is well known, if only because of the early age at which he died and his supposed death at the hands of the reviewers of his work. 1 Although a first collected edition of his poems—with those of Coleridge and Shelley—was published as early as 1829 by Galignani in Paris, 2 it was not until the Victorian age, and the publication of Richard Monckton Milnes’s first official biography in 1848, that Keats’s poetry began to attract serious attention. 3 Tennyson and Browning were great admirers of Keats’s work, and the Pre-Raphaelite painters ranked him with Dante, Chaucer and Goethe (also known for his stay in Rome, in a house just a few blocks away from Piazza di Spagna). By the end of the nineteenth century, both Keats and Shelley had become acclaimed literary figures, their writings as popular as those of their great contemporary, Lord Byron, who had died of fever in April 1824, aged thirty-six, while fighting for the cause of the Greeks at Missolonghi.
