"To Autumn" is a poem by English Romantic poet John Keats. The work was composed on 19 September 1819 and published in 1820 in a volume of Keats's poetry that included Lamia and The Eve of St. Agnes. "To Autumn" is the final work in a group of poems known as Keats's "1819 odes". Although personal problems left him little time to devote to poetry in 1819, he composed "To Autumn" after a walk near Winchester one autumnal evening. The work marks the end of his poetic career, as he needed to earn money and could no longer devote himself to the lifestyle of a poet. A little over a year after the publication of "To Autumn", Keats died in Rome.
Sketch of Keats by Charles Brown, August 1819, one month before the composition of "To Autumn"
Manuscript copy of "To Autumn" page 1
Manuscript copy of "To Autumn" page 2
Harvested field, Hampshire
John Keats was an English poet of the second generation of Romantic poets, along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. His poems had been in publication for less than four years when he died of tuberculosis at the age of 25. They were indifferently received in his lifetime, but his fame grew rapidly after his death. By the end of the century, he was placed in the canon of English literature, strongly influencing many writers of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; the Encyclopædia Britannica of 1888 called one ode "one of the final masterpieces".
Posthumous portrait by William Hilton, c. 1822
Life mask of Keats by Benjamin Haydon, 1816
Wentworth Place, now the Keats House museum (left), Ten Keats Grove (right), Hampstead Heath, London
Ambrotype of Fanny Brawne taken circa 1850 (photograph on glass)