The Enduring Mystery of Keats’s Last Words

There’s no doubt that Keats foresaw his death with brutal clarity. The question that begins in the London Keats House and continues in Rome—both at the Keats-Shelley House and at Keats’s gravesite—is how exactly he felt about that. Surely heartbroken, frightened, frustrated, despairing. But the words that he asked his friends to have carved into his gravestone—only these words, not his name—conjure an enigma: “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.”

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