A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: 

Its loveliness increases; it will never

Pass into nothingness; but still will keep

A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”— that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. 

It also leads us to certain celebrated passages in Keats’s letters, in particular thosewhich touch on Keats’s ideas of poetic selflessness: for instance, when he famously imagines himself pecking among the gravel with the sparrows, or (most centrally) when he explains to his brothers his idea of the “negative capability” which he thinks is essential for any great literary achievement: “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”. It is an idea Keats summarises by saying: “This pursued through Volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.”