One of the most enduring icons of this teenage refusal to be numbed to the world is surely John Keats, the Romantic poet born in London in 1795 and dead of tuberculosis by the age of twenty-five. He is immortalized, in popular memory at least, as a delicate, sensitive character who never quite grew up: his contemporaries like William Wordsworth declared his work to be “unhealthy,” or, like Lord Byron, made fun of his verse as “mental masturbation” (“John’s piss-a-bed poetry” was another of Byron’s monikers).
