Keats’s Mortality

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Even by the standards of his time, Keats was exposed to an unusual amount of death and dying. But to understand why Keats meditated so constantly on death, it is not necessary to look to his biography; one need only listen to what he wrote. Once he took fame as his destiny, he began to question its value and purpose. This is a kind of self-questioning that comes to most poets only in middle age, if at all. To Keats, who compressed the experience of a lifetime into a career of five years, it came in his early twenties. For art to deserve the supreme value that Keats assigned it, it must mean something more than the glorification of the artist. In serving beauty, Keats came to believe, he was in some obscure way serving the Divine, not just his own ambitions.</jats:p>