Poet, born in London, UK. Educated at Enfield, he was apprenticed to a surgeon and became a dresser at Guy's Hospital, London. Leigh Hunt introduced him to other young Romantics, including Shelley, and published his first sonnets in the Examiner (1816). His first book of poems was published in 1817. His long mythological poem Endymion (1818) was attacked by the critics as the writing of an ignorant apothecary, but he was nonetheless able to write Lamia and Other Poems (1820), a landmark in English poetry, which contains ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ and ‘Lamia’, and his major odes. Seriously ill with tuberculosis, he sailed for Italy, and died in Rome. He was buried in the Protestant cemetery in Rome, where his friend David Severn designed a monument for him. His Letters (1848) are among the most celebrated in the language, and he is regarded as one of the principal figures of the Romantic movement.