The other is the same poet's grave at the extreme northwest corner of the Protestant Cemetery down on the Ostian Way, at the Aurelian Wall, just beside the pyramid of Caius Cestius. In the great history of Rome, John Keats is necessarily a minor figure, and my own reasons for liking him are, I suppose, entirely personal. It just happens that he was the first writer whose craft I was able to dissect and discern in a critical way. If, over the years, I have been able to learn anything of technical skill in writing English, I will never forget that my first teacher was John Keats. I began to gain some notion of how language could be carefully, systematically crafted.
Similar instances shout for attention from the recesses of memory.
There was, for example, Keats's calculated use of the Petrarchan rhyme sequence in the Chapman's Homer sonnet, in which each quatrain of the octave must arch out three full lines before there is a rhyme corresponding to its first line. Keats deftly uses that structure to sustain the suspense he is trying to create in the images of searching that give substance to the octave. Then, in the sestet, both theme and structure alter dramatically and simultaneously. Thus, the poem's twin themes, searching and discovery, are settled on a structure that completely sustains them both. To me it was an impressive lesson about how submission to a traditional, inherited form can hold together and support a living reality, a lesson going well beyond the requirements of literature.