"Reciting the odes, I became aware of a kind of astral wind, a malevolent chill, of a soul chained to the place where the body died, of a silent malignant laughter that mocked not my reading but the poems themselves."

On another occasion, making a television film for Canada, he recited Keats's sonnet "When I have fears that I may cease to be" on the steps outside that house. During the fourteen lines a clear sky became stormy, rain poured, thunder drowned the words. Burgess says he is not "imputing a demonic vindictiveness" to the soul of John Keats, but believes that his fierce creative energy, frustrated by death, haunts the house where he died. He goes on to speculate that if Keats had lived, as Belli did, to the age of 72, he might have moved from his "consumptive romanticism" to a fuller poetry, "doing Browning's work better than Browning". Burgess perhaps admired the Keats of the letters, witty, wise beyond his years, Shakespearean in his quick intelligence, more than the singer of Endymion, the post-Miltonic author of the unfinished Hyperion, or even the dreamy singer of the great Odes.

However Burgess is very clear that the novel, Abba Abba, which recounts briefly and economically the death of Keats, sprang more from an obsession with the Roman poet, Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli. Belli died in 1861, at 72 – he could have met Keats in Rome, though there is no evidence that he did. He was the author of 2,279 sonnets in the Roman dialect, and the sonnets were blasphemous, obscene and according to Burgess full of scholarly curiosity about their own language. He was also a Vatican censor, a double man, like Burgess himself, in some ways.