News at Eleven: "Keats's odes of spring 1819 have often

been read as his most 'philosophical' engagement with the intractable contraries of beauty and mortality, time and eternity," added [Nicholas] Roe. "To find those two odes and, I suspect, La Belle Dame sans Merci, arose from opium reveries gives us a less intellectual or 'philosophical' Keats, and a poet who is closer to the mystical aspects of Romantic tradition associated with Blake, Baudelaire, Coleridge, De Quincey, Yeats, Huxley and Bob Dylan."

In his book John Keats, published by Yale University Press, Roe claims that "to be 'half in love with easeful death'," as Keats wrote in Ode to a Nightingale, is the hallmark of the confirmed addict.

from The Guardian: John Keats was an opium addict, claims a new biography of the poet
then Financial Times: Beauty that must die

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