John Keats Trivia
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50 free John Keats trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
John Keats trivia is the story of a poet who trained as a surgeon, published for barely four years, was savaged by the critics, and died of tuberculosis in a room on the Spanish Steps at the age of 25, convinced he had left nothing behind. Within a lifetime he was in the canon of English literature; today the 1819 odes are among the most studied poems in the language. This quiz follows him from Moorgate and the Swan and Hoop inn through Clarke's school at Enfield, the apprenticeship to a surgeon-apothecary, dressing wounds at Guy's Hospital, the night he read Chapman's Homer, Leigh Hunt and the 'Cockney School' sneer, the failure of Endymion and Byron's 'snuffed out by an article', the annus mirabilis at Wentworth Place and the nightingale under the plum tree, Isabella Jones and Fanny Brawne, the love-sonnet Bright Star, the arterial-blood 'death warrant', the quarantine at Naples, Dr Clark's starvation diet, the death nursed by Joseph Severn, the tombstone 'writ in Water', Shelley's Adonais, and the afterlife of the letters and negative capability. Easy questions suit anyone who has read one ode; the expert tier is for people who know which magazine coined 'the Cockney School'. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's article on Keats, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Keats is counted among which generation of English Romantic poets?
The second
The second generation were still children when the first launched the movement in 1798, yet its three leading poets all died young, years before the elders they had followed.
Q 02Of what disease did Keats die at the age of 25?
Tuberculosis
Tuberculosis had already killed his mother and a brother. Roman law treated it as contagious, so after he died the furniture in his room was burned.
Q 03Which words complete the famous opening line of Keats's Endymion, 'A thing of beauty is…'?
A joy for ever
'A joy for ever' was an afterthought: a fellow medical student recalled Keats first trying 'a constant joy' on him, then rewriting the line when he seemed unconvinced.
Q 04What was Keats's father's job?
Ostler at a livery stable
Ostler at a livery stable: Keats's father worked at the Swan and Hoop in London, married the owner's daughter and ended up managing the business himself.
Q 05How did Keats's father die in 1804, when the boy was eight?
A fall from his horse
A fall from his horse on a late ride home fractured his skull, and he died the next morning. Their mother died six years later, leaving the four children to a grandmother.
Q 06F. Scott Fitzgerald took the title of which of his novels from a line in one of Keats's odes?
Tender Is the Night
Tender Is the Night borrows a phrase from 'Ode to a Nightingale', and Fitzgerald printed the lines as the novel's epigraph: 'Already with thee! tender is the night'.
Q 07In Keats's poem Isabella, the heroine hides her murdered lover's head in a pot of which herb?
Basil
Basil: she tends the pot obsessively while she wastes away. Keats took the grisly story from Boccaccio's Decameron, and the Pre-Raphaelites later painted the scene more than once.
Q 08Where did Keats train as a medical student and dresser from 1815?
Guy's Hospital
Guy's Hospital saw his last operation, the opening of a man's temporal artery. He did it neatly, he told a friend, but his own dexterity seemed a miracle and he never took up the lancet again.
Q 09What qualification did Keats gain in 1816, allowing him to practise medicine?
An apothecary's licence
An apothecary's licence came in July 1816, after years of training. He never used it: within months he told his guardian that he meant to be a poet instead.
Q 10Keats's 1816 sonnet has 'stout Cortez' first sighting the Pacific from Darien; which explorer really did that in 1513?
Vasco Núñez de Balboa
Vasco Núñez de Balboa saw the ocean from a peak in Panama, then marched down to the shore days later and claimed the whole sea for Spain. Keats's line kept Cortez all the same.
Q 11Which influential poet and editor was Keats introduced to in October 1816 by his old schoolmaster's son?
Leigh Hunt
Leigh Hunt was a hero to the young Keats: he had served two years in prison for mocking the Prince Regent in his newspaper, which he went on editing from his cell.
Q 12Keats's unfinished epic Hyperion follows which race of Greek gods after their defeat by the Olympians?
The Titans
The Titans, led by the dethroned Saturn, brood on their fall. Keats abandoned the poem in its third book because, he said, it had 'too many Miltonic inversions'.
Q 13The line 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' concludes which of Keats's odes?
'Ode on a Grecian Urn'
Q 21Which periodical coined the sneer 'the Cockney School' for Keats and his London friends?
Blackwood's Magazine
Blackwood's Magazine ran the attacks under the signature 'Z'. One of them dismissed Endymion as 'imperturbable drivelling idiocy'.
Q 22Which medieval-style ballad did Keats write in 1819?
'La Belle Dame sans Merci'
'La Belle Dame sans Merci' borrowed its title from a French court poem four centuries older, and its doomed knight became a favourite subject of the Pre-Raphaelite painters.
Q 23After shaking Keats's hand in a lane near Highgate, which older poet said, 'There is death in that hand'?
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
'Ode on a Grecian Urn' describes no one real vase: Keats blended scenes from several, among them a marble urn in the Louvre whose engraving he traced by hand.
Q 14On his 1818 walking tour with Charles Brown, Keats struggled through mist to the summit of which mountain?
Ben Nevis
Ben Nevis nearly finished him: he had walked more than 600 miles with a worsening sore throat, and days later a doctor in Inverness ordered him to abandon the tour.
Q 15Which of his brothers did Keats nurse through a last illness that ended in December 1818?
Tom
Tom was nineteen. Keats came home from his northern walking tour that August to find him far worse, and stayed at his bedside in their Hampstead lodgings until the end.
Q 16Keats wrote most of his great odes in 1819 while lodging in which house, now a museum to him?
Wentworth Place
Wentworth Place was really a pair of semi-detached houses, and Keats lodged in a friend's half. Later owners renamed it and knocked the two into a single house.
Q 17According to his housemate, where did Keats write 'Ode to a Nightingale'?
Under a plum tree
Under a plum tree in the garden: he carried a chair out, came back a few hours later with scraps of paper and quietly tucked them behind some books.
Q 18Keats's poem Lamia opens with the god Hermes freeing its heroine from the body of which creature?
A serpent
A serpent: made a woman again, she wins a young man of Corinth, but at their wedding feast a philosopher recognises her and calls her by name, and she vanishes with a scream.
Q 19Keats's long poem Endymion, damned by the critics, was dedicated to which doomed young poet?
Thomas Chatterton
Thomas Chatterton died of arsenic in a London garret at seventeen, penniless and unrecognised. The Romantic poets mourned him as a lost genius, and Keats inscribed the poem to his memory.
Q 20Which poet joked in verse that Keats had been 'snuffed out by an article' after savage reviews of Endymion?
Lord Byron
Lord Byron rhymed it in Don Juan with 'that very fiery particle', the mind. The legend stuck, though Keats had in fact met the reviews calmly and gone on writing.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge recalled a meeting of a minute or so. Keats's own letter describes walking nearly two miles beside him while he talked of nightingales, dreams and 'a thousand things'.
Q 24In the folk belief behind Keats's 'The Eve of St. Agnes', a girl who goes supperless to bed dreams of whom?
Her future husband
Her future husband, or so the old wives tell Madeline. Her lover hides in her bedroom to make the dream come true, and the pair slip out of the castle that same night.
Q 25Which young woman who moved into the other half of his Hampstead house in 1819 became the love of Keats's life?
Fanny Brawne
Fanny Brawne kept his anguished love letters for the rest of her life. They were published only after her death, and many readers of the day were appalled to see them in print.
Q 26Which love sonnet did Keats copy into a volume of Shakespeare's poems on the ship taking him to Italy?
'Bright Star'
'Bright Star' was written out on a blank page facing 'A Lover's Complaint'. His travelling companion took it for the last poem Keats ever wrote, but a draft survives from more than a year earlier.
Q 27On coughing up blood in February 1820, what did Keats call the drop, recognising its colour?
'My death warrant'
'My death warrant' was a trained medic's verdict. He asked for a candle, studied the single drop on the sheet and told his friend calmly that it was arterial blood, so he must die.
Q 28Which friend, a painter, accompanied Keats on his final voyage to Italy in 1820?
Joseph Severn
Joseph Severn had won the Royal Academy's gold medal months earlier, yet his prospects in London still looked thin, and when a friend urged him to go with Keats he agreed at once.
Q 29In which Italian port was the ship carrying the dying Keats held in quarantine for ten days in 1820?
Naples
Naples kept the passengers shut in a cramped cabin offshore. Keats said later that in that one week he had made more puns, out of a sort of desperation, than in any year of his life.
Q 30Keats spent his last months in a house beside which Roman landmark, now a museum in his memory?
The Spanish Steps
The Spanish Steps rise right beside the house at 26 Piazza di Spagna. His doctor, who worked on the same square, had taken the rooms for him before he reached the city.