The Dead Poet's Society

One of our field trips was to the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. It is a beautiful cemetery with one of its main attractions being the gravesite of English poet, John Keats. He became famous for his writings posthumously and is known for poems like, Ode To A Nightingale, Ode to a Grecian Urn, and La Belle Dame Sans Merci.






The phrase "Here lies one whose name was writ in water" are the only words Keats requested on his gravestone. His friends, Joseph Severn and Charles Brown, who cared for him during his illness, added:

This Grave contains all that was mortal, of a YOUNG ENGLISH POET, who on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his heart, at the Malicious Power of his enemies, desired these words to be Engraven on his Tomb Stone.





After we went to the cemetery, we went to what is the Keat-Shelley House where Keats lived when he moved to Rome.


Me and Mary Hester on the Spanish Steps


The house is on the right of the Steps

On the advice of Keat's doctors, who had determined he had tuberculosis, Keats left England in 1820 and went to Italy. He rented a house on the Spanish Steps. He died on the February 23, 1821 at the age of 25.


Inside the house (me, Mary Hester, Ali, Cydney, Madelin)


Keat's bed and face cast

"The poetry of the earth is never dead." -John Keats