John Keats Dies of Tuberculosis in Insect-Infested Rome
Poets involved
What happened
John Keats travelled to Rome in November 1820 in a last desperate attempt to benefit from the milder climate, dying in the small apartment on the Spanish Steps on 23 February 1821. Rome in the early nineteenth century was both romantically beautiful and medically hazardous, with malaria present in the low-lying parts of the city and the surrounding campagna. Keats's final months were spent in a city where insect-borne disease was a constant environmental reality, adding to the atmosphere of exquisite beauty under biological threat that characterises his final period.
Literary impact
Keats's death in Rome — the consumptive poet expiring in a city shadowed by malaria as well as tuberculosis — became one of the founding myths of Romantic tragic genius. Percy Shelley's elegy Adonais (1821), written in response to Keats's death, is saturated with the imagery of a beautiful natural world that harbours death, linking Keats's fate to the malaria and 'bad air' of the Roman environment as well as to the 'worm' of disease. Keats's Roman death thus connects the Romantic tradition to the ancient history of mosquito-borne disease in Italy.
Source: Wikipedia
