When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be

“Sonnet 30” by William Shakespeare (1609)

“When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be” is in the tradition of the Shakespearean sonnet. The English sonnet is often so-called because it was popularized by William Shakespeare. “Sonnet 30” shares themes of regret, grief, and isolation, as well as an emotional resolution in the concluding couplet.

“Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats (1819)

“Ode on a Grecian Urn” may be Keats’s most famous poem. This is one of the six odes—sometimes called the Great Odes—Keats wrote in 1819. The speaker studies their subject carefully and renders it in imaginative, passionate detail. The poem ends with a frequently quoted summation of Keats’s core aesthetic beliefs:

’Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know’ (Lines 49-50).

“Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats” by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1821)

Percy composed this 495 line, 55 stanza poem in memory of Keats. This pastoral elegy modeled after John Milton’s “Lycidas” is a formalist feat, considered by many to be one of Shelley’s best works. In the preface to the published poem, Shelley made the infamous claim that unfair critics and their scathing reviews killed Keats.