When the World Stops, Traveling in John Keats’s ‘Realms of Gold’

Susan Wright for The New York Times

In 1820, the British poet spent 10 days quarantined in the Bay of Naples as typhus raged, an enforced stillness mirrored by our own.

"His brief period of quarantine fascinates me. Keats, almost 25, only had four more months to live and he already felt himself to be leading a posthumous existence. He invented puns; he read Byron. He was annoyed by a woman passenger, a fellow consumptive. Then he set down the events of his life in order to make sense of it. The document is a painful read. He had, of course, no way to know that, to far-distant readers like me, his life story would be triumphant, too."

Read more: The New York Times