Who Killed John Keats?

By AMY LEAL

Who killed John Keats? I, says the Quarterly So savage and Tartarly; 'Twas one of my feats.

— Lord Byron

Two months before he died, John Keats claimed he had been poisoned. Shaken and confused, his friend Joseph Severn reported the conversation in a letter that was later partially obliterated: "his dreadful state of mind turns to [per]secuti[on and some]times even murder — he is now under the...was administered to him by an individual in