On this day in 1818, John Keats visited the first home of Robert Burns in Alloway and composed his sonnet, "Written in the Cottage Where Burns Was Born." Keats was twenty-two years old, barely published, and on a summer-long walking tour of the North Country -- twenty or thirty rugged miles a day and "No supper but Eggs and Oat cake," which corrects the wan-and-weary side of the Keats myth. Virtually all his best poems would come in a nine-month burst beginning the next January; he would cough blood for the first time on February 3 of the following year ("That drop of blood is my death warrant"); he would die on February 23 of the following year ... FULL STORY »
