On October 31, 1795 -- John Keats (British poet) born

as noted in "The Writer's Almanac" (American Public Media: Garrison Keillor):

October 31 isthe birthday of English poet John Keats, born in London (1795). Keats's short life was marked by the deaths of friends and family members. His father died when he was nine, and one year later, his grandfather died. When he was 15, his mother died of tuberculosis, the disease that eventually killed his brother and, later, Keats himself.

He began writing poetry after he had started his career as an apothecary in London. His first book, Poems (1817), was not well received. His publishers dropped him, but other poets saw promise in his work. His breakthrough poem was a sonnet called "On first looking into Chapman's Homer." Keats had stayed up all night reading George Chapman's translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey with a friend. They stopped reading at 6:00 a.m., and by 10:00, Keats had written the poem and set it on the breakfast table for his friend.
Keats fell in love with Fanny Brawne, a young woman whom he met shortly after the death of his brother. They were engaged in 1819. The two wrote frequently to one another, but did not spend much time together. Keats was already fighting his own ill health. In one letter, he wrote, "I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your Loveliness and the hour of my death."
Keats wrote most of the poetry for which he is famous in one 12-month period, from September 1818 to September 1819. He wrote "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on Melancholy," "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," and "To Autumn." One of Keats's sonnets foreshadowed his early death. He wrote: "When I have fears that I may cease to be / Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain, / ... -- then on the shore / Of the wide world I stand alone, and think / Till love and fame to nothingness do sink." (1818). He died three years later, in a small bedroom in a house in Rome. His tombstone reads, at his request, "Here lies one whose name was writ in water."
Keats wrote, "A thing of beauty is a joy forever: its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness."