Spanish Steps

John Keats died in 1821 in the house in the right foreground.

'Beauty is truth; truth, beauty'--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
- John Keats, Ode to a Grecian Urn [1819]

-- surely the most famous equation in English literature. The exact meaning of those lines is disputed; no less a critic than T.S. Eliot considered them a blight upon an otherwise beautiful poem.

John Keats

"Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?"

"I have left no immortal work behind me--nothing to make my friends proud of my memory--but I have loved the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remembered."

- John Keats [1795 - 1821]