Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, our weekly column in which writers share a poem or a paragraph that all of us should commit to heart. This week, Spencer Klavan, host of the delightful classics podcast Young Heretics, reflects on visiting the grave of John Keats, the magnificent Romantic who died believing the world didn’t care for his work.
If you visit Rome’s so-called “Protestant Cemetery,” where many of the city’s non-Catholic notables are buried, you’ll find a simple white tombstone. It’s adorned with the curving arms and slender strings of a lyre, the ancient Greek instrument beloved by poets. And at the very bottom of the stone is a sentence framed by quotation marks: “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.” The man buried there is the English poet John Keats. He was 25 when he died.
Two hundred years ago, as Keats lay dying of tuberculosis, the horrible wasting disease that killed his brother, he despaired of ever being widely known and loved for his art. His poems were greeted with shrugs during his lifetime. Hence the inscription: He accepted that his name would quickly vanish into oblivion.
His friends were so dismayed by his attitude, however, that they added a note to the tombstone, saying that Keats had only condemned himself to oblivion “in the bitterness of his heart.” If he hadn’t been so crushed by grief over his own short life, they felt, he could have seen that the world might one day acknowledge his achievements.
They were right to hope, of course. Today, the poems of Keats are celebrated as some of the Romantic era’s greatest masterpieces.
I suppose I should find all this depressing: the doomed genius who never got the love he deserved in his lifetime. When I first visited Keats’s grave, I was the loneliest I’ve ever been—coming off an ugly breakup, staring down the end of grad school with no career in sight. The thought of an artist I loved dying unrecognized ought to have made me miserable.
But somehow I found it hugely comforting.
