Author: Polina Whitehouse

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One of John Keats’s letters reveals the poet’s preference for “a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts.”¹ In much of his work, Keats exalts and emphasizes the physical, sensory, and emotional, while discounting rational thought. The sonnet “When I have fears that I may cease to be,” however, modifies this trend through an exploration of a writer’s fear of early death, something Keats himself likely experienced, as he died at a young age of tuberculosis. The poem’s form is particularly conducive to this development of a living philosophy. Structured as a Shakespearean sonnet, the poem develops the speaker’s preoccupation with physical aliveness, but ends with a turn at the heroic couplet, in which he accepts that he cannot attain his literary and romantic ambitions but that the process of thinking is sufficient.