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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 01To which generation of Romantic poets did Keats belong, alongside Byron and Shelley?
The second
His poems were in print for less than four years before he died at 25.
Q 02Of what disease did Keats die at the age of 25?
Tuberculosis
It was his 'family disease'; his mother and both brothers also died of it.
Q 03In which part of London was Keats born in 1795?
Moorgate
His father worked at the Swan and Hoop inn nearby; the Globe pub now occupies the site.
Q 04What was Keats's father's job?
Ostler at a coaching inn
He was an ostler and later ran the Swan and Hoop, owned by his father-in-law.
Q 05How did Keats's father die in 1804, when the boy was eight?
A fall from his horse
His mother died six years later, leaving the children in the care of their grandmother.
Q 06At whose school in Enfield did Keats develop his love of classics and history?
John Clarke's
The headmaster's son, Charles Cowden Clarke, became a key mentor and introduced him to Chapman's translations.
Q 07To what trade was the 14-year-old Keats apprenticed after leaving school in 1810?
Surgeon-apothecary
He lodged in the attic above Thomas Hammond's surgery until 1813.
Q 08Where did Keats train as a medical student and dresser from 1815?
Guy's Hospital
A dresser assisted surgeons in operations, roughly a junior house surgeon today.
Q 09What qualification did Keats gain in 1816, allowing him to practise medicine?
An apothecary's licence
Before the year was out he told his guardian he had resolved to be a poet instead.
Q 10Which sonnet, published in The Examiner in May 1816, was the first Keats poem to appear in print?
'O Solitude'
Charles Cowden Clarke called it his friend's 'red letter day'.
Q 11Which influential poet and editor was Keats introduced to in October 1816 by his old schoolmaster's son?
Leigh Hunt
He was a close friend of Byron and Shelley and championed Keats as part of 'a new school of poetry'.
Q 12Which lawyer for Keats's publishers became a devoted collector of 'Keatsiana'?
Richard Woodhouse
Andrew Motion likens him to Boswell to Keats's Johnson.
Q 13The line 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' concludes which of Keats's odes?
'Ode on a Grecian Urn'
The idea first appeared in a letter to his friend Bailey about the truth of the imagination.
Q 21Which periodical's critic John Gibson Lockhart coined the sneer 'the Cockney School' for Hunt's circle?
Blackwood's Magazine
He told Keats to go 'back to plasters, pills, and ointment boxes'.
Q 22Which of these medievalist poems did Keats write in 1819?
'La Belle Dame sans Merci'
With 'The Eve of St. Agnes' it strongly influenced the later Pre-Raphaelites.
Q 23What was the title of the acclaimed final volume Keats lived to see published, in July 1820?
Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems
Q 14With which friend did Keats take a walking tour of Scotland, Ireland and the Lake District in 1818?
Charles Armitage Brown
He caught a bad cold on the Isle of Mull that some think let the family disease take hold.
Q 15Which of Keats's brothers, whom he nursed through his final illness, died in December 1818?
Tom
His brother George had by then emigrated to America.
Q 16Keats's 'annus mirabilis' of great poetry unfolded at which house on the edge of Hampstead Heath?
Wentworth Place
It now houses the Keats House museum, and the garden is still there.
Q 17According to his housemate, Keats composed 'Ode to a Nightingale' sitting under what?
A plum tree
Brown said Keats sat there for hours and came back with scraps of paper he stuffed behind the books.
Q 18How many of his six great odes did Keats write at his Hampstead home in the spring of 1819?
Five
'To Autumn' followed that September; 'Ode to Psyche' opened the published series.
Q 19Keats's long poem Endymion, damned by the critics, was dedicated to which doomed young poet?
Thomas Chatterton
Byron quipped that Keats was 'snuffed out by an article' after the reviews of Endymion.
Q 20How did Byron sum up the idea that harsh reviews of Endymion killed Keats?
'Snuffed out by an article'
John Wilson Croker's review in the Quarterly Review had been particularly savage.
It won favourable notices in the Examiner and the Edinburgh Review.
Q 24Which older woman did Keats meet at Bo Peep near Hastings in 1817, an early intimate of his circle?
Isabella Jones
She may have suggested the themes of 'The Eve of St. Agnes' and was among the first told of his death.
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
She shared her first name with both Keats's sister and mother.
Q 26Which love sonnet did Keats give his fiancée as a declaration, revising it until his last months?
'Bright Star'
He made his final revisions to it on the ship carrying him to Italy.
Q 27On coughing up blood in February 1820, what did Keats call the drop, recognising its colour?
'My death warrant'
He told Brown, 'I know the colour of that blood... I must die.'
Q 28Which friend, a painter, accompanied Keats on his final voyage to Italy in 1820?
Joseph Severn
He nursed Keats devotedly to the end and is buried beside him in Rome.
Q 29Why was Keats's ship held in quarantine for ten days at Naples?
A suspected cholera outbreak in Britain
He did not reach Rome until 14 November, too late for any benefit from the warmer climate.
Q 30On which famous Roman staircase did Keats spend his last months, in a house now a museum?
The Spanish Steps
The villa is now the Keats–Shelley Memorial House.