Founded in 1903, and based in London, we are the charity that supports the Keats-Shelley House in Rome, where the English poet John Keats died in 1821. We purchased the House in 1906. Over the past century, we have transformed the first-floor apartment into a museum and library dedicated to the Romantic writers, above all those - Keats, PB and Mary Shelley, Lord Byron - with strong attachments to Italy.
We are also responsible for maintaining the graves of Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Joseph Severn and Edward Trelawny in the non-Catholic Cemetery at Testaccio. Read Anthony Gardner's article about Keats and Shelley's graves at the Keats-Shelley Blog.
As part of our ongoing commitment to Romantic scholarship, we publish the scholarly Keats-Shelley Review.
We run the annual Keats-Shelley and Young Romantics Writing Prizes to find promising poets and essayists from around the world. And we aim to help budding scholars and writers through the Sheila Birkenhead Bursary and the Keats-Shelley Fellowship.
In Rome, the Keats-Shelley House offers outreach programmes, lectures and events, and organises a poetry competition for school students. For more information visit the Keats-Shelley House website
To mark the 200th anniversaries of the deaths of John Keats and PB Shelley, we ran a programme of events and projects: Keats-Shelley200. Follow John Keats' Final Voyage from England to Italy via a Google Earth story-map: https://bit.ly/KeatsFinalVoyage
Listen to readings, interviews and biography at the Keats-Shelley Podcast.
The House, which currently receives no public funding, relies on poetry lovers from around the world - those that visit in person and those that help us from afar.
Support us by becoming a Friend of KSMA or planning a legacy.
Sir Ivor Roberts Appointed as New Chair of the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association: for further information, visit News.
Officers of the Association:
- Chair: Sir Ivor Roberts, KCMG, FCIL
- Hon. Treasurer: Charles Cary-Elwes
- Hon. Secretary and Company Secretary: David Leigh-Hunt
Friends Secretary: James Kidd. Details on becoming a Friend of KSMA here.
Curator of the Keats-Shelley House: Dr Ella Kilgallon. Read Ella's welcome to the Keats-Shelley House.