When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1848

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Related Poems

“Sonnet 30” by William Shakespeare (1609)

“When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be” is in the tradition of the Shakespearean sonnet. The English sonnet is often so-called because it was popularized by William Shakespeare. “Sonnet 30” shares themes of regret, grief, and isolation, as well as an emotional resolution in the concluding couplet.

“Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats (1819)

“Ode on a Grecian Urn” may be Keats’s most famous poem. This is one of the six odes—sometimes called the Great Odes—Keats wrote in 1819. The speaker studies their subject carefully and renders it in imaginative, passionate detail. The poem ends with a frequently quoted summation of Keats’s core aesthetic beliefs:

’Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know’ (Lines 49-50).

“Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats” by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1821)

Percy composed this 495 line, 55 stanza poem in memory of Keats. This pastoral elegy modeled after John Milton’s “Lycidas” is a formalist feat, considered by many to be one of Shelley’s best works. In the preface to the published poem, Shelley made the infamous claim that unfair critics and their scathing reviews killed Keats. This claim, though oft repeated, is now widely agreed to be an exaggeration. Shelley’s intense admiration of Keats and grief for his unrealized potential shines through in verse:

He has outsoar'd the shadow of our night;

Envy and calumny and hate and pain,

And that unrest which men miscall delight,

Can touch him not and torture not again (Stanza 40, Lines 1-4).

“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth (1815)

This lyric poem was first published in the Poems, Two Volumes collection that Keats adored. Also called “Daffodils,” the speaker of the poem describes a moment of transcendent beauty in a field of wind-swept flowers. The memory of this moment still intrudes on the speaker’s thoughts and ignites those same ecstatic feelings. The two shared a poetic fascination with the transformative power of the natural world.

Further Literary Resources

Selected Poems and Letters by John Keats (2014)

This collection groups several of Keats’s most well-known poems with his letters to friends, colleagues, and lovers. Organized chronologically, this text tracks Keats’s personal and intellectual journey alongside his poetry, demonstrating how his life informed his art and vice versa.

“John Keats: ‘When I have Fears that I May Cease to Be’ (1818) and Lord Byron: ‘On This Day I Complete my Thirty-Sixth Year’ (1824)” in Facing Loss and Death: Narrative and Eventfulness in Lyric Poetry by Peter Hühn et. al (2016)

Dr. Peter Hühn was a Professor of British Studies specializing in English poetry and literary criticism. In this scholarly text, Hühn considers the narrative structure of the Keats poem in direct contrast to the Lord Byron poem. While the young speaker in the Keats poem risks wasting his life by worrying about death, the mature speaker in the Byron poem welcomes death by reflecting fondly on his accomplishments.

“An introduction to the poetry of John Keats” by Andrew Motion (2010)

Sir Andrew Motion, former Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, provides a survey of Keats’s life and times in this article for the Guardian in order to complicate the popular conception of Keats as an apolitical, sentimental “suffering genius.” Motion implores readers to give Keats his due as a serious thinker and consider the philosophical underpinnings of his highly emotional poetry.