"A Letter from Quarantine."

John Keats, the twenty-five year old poet, made a mad dash for the shores of Italy following his discovery of consumption in his lungs. In centuries past, it was believed that the warmth of the beach would heal the lungs, and after waking up to a splotch of blood on his pillow, Keats was desperate. His voyage trailed in the wake of a cholera outbreak in Britain, and he fled one country only to arrive in a ten-day quarantine in Naples. Despite his obvious unrest, historians praise this quarantine, as it produced a lot of Keat's famous, last work before his death a mere four months later. He wrote of his upbringing, and how almost every person dear to him had died. This, paired with the hatred of his fellow poets (Lord Byron once related Keat's work to a sort of 'mental masturbation') would have accounted for his melancholy. In this quarantine, he wrote;