Adonais

Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats is a long poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, written in 1821 as a tribute to the English Romantic poet John Keats, who died in February 1821 in Rome of tuberculosis. Shelley's verse is a formal lament that uses the classical figure of Adonais (Adonis) as a symbolic name for Keats, signaling both beauty and early death. The poem is composed in Spenserian stanzas and unfolds as a sustained elegy that moves from personal sorrow to expansive meditations on art, mortality, and the poet’s vocation.

The work is structured as a sequence of lyric and dramatic passages in which the speaker grieves, chastises the world for its narrow judgments, and extols the enduring power of poetry. Through its language and imagery, Adonais situates Keats within a lineage of poets whose spirits persist beyond physical death, asserting that poetry can grant a form of immortality. It also engages with themes of nature, memory, and the responsibility of the living to preserve the legacy of the dead.

Publication and reception established Adonais as a landmark of Romantic elegy. Published in London in 1821, it is widely regarded as one of Shelley's major long poems and a significant contribution to English late-Romantic verse. The elegy influenced later poetic responses to bereavement and contributed to Keats’s posthumous reputation, reinforcing the idea of the poet’s transfiguring art as a defense against oblivion.