John Keats (1795–1821) was an English Romantic poet whose career spanned six years, during which he published only fifty-four poems in three slim volumes. Trained to become a surgeon, he had no formal literary education but nonetheless developed into one of the greatest lyric poets in English. His work is characterized by an acute sense of the beauty in the natural world and the extremes of human desire, most notably in the odes, including “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and one of his best-loved long poems, “The Eve of St. Agnes.” He died from tuberculosis in Rome, where he is buried.

To Autumn

by John Keats

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
  Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
  With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
  And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
    To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
  With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
    For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

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