John Keats (1795-1821)

The greatest English poets and a major figure in the Romantic Movement

Keats's father breathed his last breath when he was eight and his mother when he was 14. These gloomy circumstances drew him close to his two brothers, Tom and George, and his only sister Fanny. Keats educated at a school in Enfield. At that time he began to translate the Virgil's Aeneid. His first attempt at writing poetry was in 1814, and includes an `Imitation' of the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser.

Keats' first volume of poems was published in 1817. It attracted some good reviews, but these were followed by the first of several harsh attacks by the influential Blackwood's Magazine.

During his lifetime, Keats fight the obstacles of his lower-middle class social status, limited education and poor health, as he sought to develop his skills as a poet and advance his poetical theories. Even after his early death at the age of twenty-five, and well into the nineteenth century, Keats's poetry continued to be disparaged as overly sensitive, sensuous, and simplistic. By the twentieth century, however, his position within the Romantic Movement had been revalued by critics. Keats’s poetry describes the beauty of the natural world and art as the vehicle for his poetic imagination

 "Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works"

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Keats Says...

"Don't be discouraged by a failure. It can be a positive experience. Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterwards carefully avoid."

 

 

"I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of imagination. What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth - whether it existed before or not."

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"I love you the more that I believe you have liked me for my own sake and for nothing else."

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"Poetry should please by a fine excess and not by singularity. It should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost as a remembrance."

 

 

 

"Tis the witching hour of night,

Orbed is the moon and bright,

And the stars they glisten, glisten,

Seeming with bright eyes to listen

For what listen they ?"

On leaving some Friends at an Early Hour

GIVE me a golden pen, and let me lean

On heap’d up flowers, in regions clear, and far;

Bring me a tablet whiter than a star,

Or hand of hymning angel, when ’tis seen

The silver strings of heavenly harp atween:

And let there glide by many a pearly car,

Pink robes, and wavy hair, and diamond jar,

And half discovered wings, and glances keen.

The while let music wander round my ears,

And as it reaches each delicious ending,

Let me write down a line of glorious tone,

And full of many wonders of the spheres:

For what a height my spirit is contending!

’Tis not content so soon to be alone.