John Keats was a major figure in the Second Generation of Romantic poets, along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. His career lasted only about four years, as he died of tuberculosis at age 25. Despite this short window, he produced some of the most beautiful and influential poetry in English literature, including his famous 'six odes' of 1819. 'Ode to a Nightingale' and 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' explore themes of mortality, the permanence of art, and the intense beauty of nature. Keats coined the term 'Negative Capability'—the ability of an artist to exist in 'uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.' He believed that poetry should strike the reader as 'a wording of their own highest thoughts.' He died in Rome, requesting that his tombstone read: 'Here lies one whose name was writ in water.'