John Keats’ life and creativity work

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Theme: John Keats’ life and creativity work

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Presented by

 

Checked by

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Contents:

1. Introduction

1. General Information
2. Biography
3. Work

• Early Poems (1814 to 1818)
• 1814
• 1815
• 1816
• 1818
• 1819
• Letters

 

4. Criticism
5. Poem desiccated to John Keats

3. Conclusion

4. Bibliography

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                 Introduction

This work has the purpose to get you acquainted with the greatest poet of Romanticism, John Keats. Here you can find very detailed information about his life and useful information about his work. I hope you are going to find at least one interesting thing for yourself. If you do it means that the work worths the efforts spent.

I chose John Keats for my work for some reasons:

• All three of the great “second generation” of Romantic poets died young: Byron died at the age of thirty-six, Shelley died when he was twenty-nine, but John Keats died when he was only twenty-five.
• Although John Keats had not been precocious, his earliest poems, written in his late teens, are conventional and unpromising, and, in fact, most of his great work was done in a single year, 1819, when he was twenty-three.
• In such short time, John Keats had composed poetry that places him among the five or six greatest English poets.
• John Keats’ work, in this single year, is far superior to anything Chaucer or Shakespeare or Milton had done at a comparable age.
• John Keats’ ancestry and background would have seemed hardly conductive to forming a poet. Byron was an aristocrat, educated at the best schools; Shelley also was born in an old, aristocratic family, which assured  him leisure to pursue the life of the mind; while Keats’ father was a hostler, his elder brother died and later he lost his mother. There was no Cambridge or Oxford in his life. He worked apprenticeship to a surgeon and apothecary – a profession of no prestige.
• John Keats was not only the last but also the most perfect of the Romanticists. While Scott was merely telling stories, and Wordsworth reforming poetry or upholding the moral law, and Shelley advocating impossible reforms, and Byron voicing his own egoism and the political discontent of the times, Keats lived apart from men and from all political measures, worshiping beauty like a devotee, perfectly content to write what was in his own heart, or to reflect some splendor of the natural world as he saw or dreamed it to be.
• While Romantic poets including Wordsworth and Shelley describe objects, Keats actually presents them. In this way he is able to stimulate the readers’ senses as thought the object were actually present.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. General information

John Keats (31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821) was an English Romantic poet. Along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, he was one of the key figures in the second generation of the Romantic movement, despite the fact that his work had been in publication for only four years before his death.

Although his poems were not generally well received by critics during his life, his reputation grew after his death to the extent that by the end of the 19th century he had become one of the most beloved of all English poets. He has had a significant influence on a diverse range of later poets and writers: Jorge Luis Borges stated that his first encounter with Keats was the most significant literary experience of his life.

The poetry of Keats is characterized by sensual imagery, most notably in the series of odes. Today his poems and letters are some of the most popular and analyzed in English literature.

2. Biography

John Keats was born on 31 October 1795 to Thomas and Frances Jennings Keats. Keats and his family seemed to have marked his birthday on 29 October, however baptism records give the birth date as the 31st. He was the eldest of four surviving children; George (1797–1841), Thomas (1799–1818) and Frances Mary "Fanny" (1803–1889). Another son was lost in infancy. John was born in central London although there is no clear evidence of the exact location. His father first worked as a hostler where the growing family lived for some years.

His parents were unable to afford Eton or Harrow, so in the summer of 1803 he was sent to board at John Clarke's school in Enfield, close to his grandparents' house. The small school had a liberal, progressive outlook and a progressive curriculum more modern than the larger, more prestigious schools. In the family atmosphere at Clarke's, Keats developed an interest in classics and history which would stay with him throughout his short life. The headmaster's son, Charles Cowden Clarke, would become an important influence, mentor and friend, introducing Keats to Renaissance literature including Tasso, Spenser and Chapman's translations. Keats is described as a volatile character "always in extremes", given to indolence and fighting. However at 13 he began focusing his energy towards reading and study, winning his first academic prize in midsummer 1809.

In April 1804, when Keats was eight, his father died after fracturing his skull falling from his horse. Four children went to live with their grandmother, Alice Jennings, in the village of Edmonton. In March 1810, when Keats was 14, his mother died of tuberculosis leaving the children in the custody of their grandmother. That autumn, Keats left Clarke's school to apprentice with Thomas Hammond, a surgeon and apothecary, neighbour and doctor of the Jennings family, and lodged in the attic above the surgery at 7 Church Street until 1813. Cowden Clarke, who remained a close friend of Keats, described this as "the most placid time in Keats's life".

From 1814 Keats had two bequests held in trust for him until his 21st birthday: £800 willed by his grandfather John Jennings (about £34,000 in today's money) and a portion of his mother's legacy, £8000 (about £340,000 today), to be equally divided between her living children.  It seems he was not told of either, since he never applied for any of the money. The money would have made a critical difference to the poet's expectations. Money was always a great concern and difficulty for him, as he struggled to stay out of debt and make his way in the world independently.

In October 1815 Keats registered as a medical student at Guy's Hospital. Within a month of starting, he was accepted as a dresser at the hospital, assisting surgeons during operations, the equivalent of a junior house surgeon today. It was a significant promotion marking a distinct aptitude for medicine, the position bringing increased responsibility and workload. His long and expensive medical training with Hammond and at Guy's Hospital led his family to assume this would be his lifelong career, assuring financial security, and it seems that at this point Keats had a genuine desire to become a doctor.

Keats's training took up increasing amounts of his writing time and he felt increasingly ambivalent about his medical career. He felt presented with a stark choice. Keats's first surviving poem, An Imitation of Spenser, had been written in 1814, when Keats was 19. Now, strongly drawn by ambition, inspired by fellow poets such as Leigh Hunt and Byron, and beleaguered by family financial crises, he suffered periods of depression. In 1816, Keats received his apothecary's licence which made him eligible to practise as an apothecary, physician and surgeon, but before the end of the year he announced to his guardian that he had resolved to be a poet, not a surgeon.

Though he continued his work and training at Guy's, Keats was devoting increasing time to the study of literature, experimenting with verse forms, particularly at this time sonnets. In May 1816, Leigh Hunt agreed to publish the sonnet O Solitude in his magazine The Examiner. In the summer of that year he went with Clarke to the seaside town of Margate to write. There he began Calidore and initiated the era of his great letter writing.

In October, Clarke introduced Keats to the influential Hunt, a close friend of Byron and Shelley. Five months later Poems, the first volume of Keats verse, was published, which included "I stood tiptoe" and "Sleep and Poetry", both poems strongly influenced by Hunt. Keats's publishers, Charles and James Ollier, felt ashamed of the book. Keats immediately changed publishers to Taylor and Hessey on Fleet Street. Unlike Olliers, Keats's new publishers were enthusiastic about his work. Within a month of the publication of Poems they were planning a new Keats volume and had paid him an advance. Hessey became a steady friend to Keats and made the company's rooms available for young writers to meet. Their publishing lists would come to include Coleridge, Hazlitt, Clare, Hogg, Carlyle and Lamb.

At Taylor and Hessey Keats met their Eton-educated lawyer Richard Woodhouse. Woodhouse, who advised the publishers on literary as well as legal matters, was deeply impressed by Poems. Woodhouse was convinced of Keats's genius, a poet to support as he became one of England's greatest writers. Soon after they met, the two became close friends and Woodhouse started to collect Keatsiana, documenting as much as he could about Keats's poetry, an archive that survives as one of the main sources of information on Keats's work. At the end, Woodhouse would be one of the few people to accompany Keats to Gravesend to embark on his final trip to Rome.

Hunt published the sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer. He introduced Keats to many prominent men in his circle, including editor of The Times Thomas Barnes, writer Charles Lamb, conductor Vincent Novello and poet John Hamilton Reynolds, who would become a close friend. He was also meeting William Hazlitt regularly, a powerful literary figure of the day. It was a decisive turning point for Keats, establishing him in the public eye as a figure in, what Hunt termed 'a new school of poetry'. n early December, under the heady influence of his artistic friends, Keats told Abbey that he had decided to give up medicine in favour of poetry.

In April 1817 Keats moved with his brothers into rooms  in the village of Hampstead.

In May 1817 Keats befriended Isabella Jones. She is described as beautiful, talented and widely read, not of the top flight of society yet financially secure, an enigmatic figure who would become a part of Keats's circle. Throughout their friendship Keats never hesitates to own his sexual attraction to her, although they seem to enjoy circling each other rather than offering commitment. It is unclear how close they were. ones' greatest significance may be as an inspiration and steward of Keats's writing.

Keats first met Frances (Fanny) Brawne between September and November 1818. During November 1818 she developed an intimacy with Keats, but it was shadowed by the illness of Tom Keats, whom John was nursing through this period.

Tom, who was suffering from tuberculosis, died on 1 December 1818.

John Keats moved to the newly-built Wentworth Place. The winter of 1818–19, though a difficult period for the poet, and marks the beginning of his annus mirabilis in which he wrote his most mature work. He had been inspired by a series of recent lectures by Hazlitt on English poets and poetic identity and had also met Wordsworth. Keats may have seemed to his friends to be living on comfortable means, but was in reality borrowing regularly from Abbey and his friends.

He composed five of his six great odes at Wentworth Place in April and May and, although it is debated in which order they were written, "Ode to Psyche" opens the published series. Keats's new and progressive publishers Taylor and Hessey issued Endymion. It was Lockhart at Blackwoods who coined the defamatory term "the Cockney School" for Hunt and his circle, which included both Hazlitt and Keats. The dismissal was as much political as literary, aimed at upstart young writers deemed uncouth for their lack of education, non-formal rhyming and "low diction". They had not attended Eton, Harrow or Oxbridge and they were not from the upper classes.

In 1819, Keats wrote The Eve of St. Agnes, "La Belle Dame sans Merci", Hyperion, Lamia and Otho. In September, very short of money and in despair considering taking up journalism or a post as a ship's surgeon, he approached his publishers with a new book of poems. he final volume Keats lived to see, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, was eventually published in July 1820.

During 1820 Keats displayed increasingly serious symptoms of tuberculosis. Tuberculosis took hold and he was advised by his doctors to move to a warmer climate. In September 1820 Keats left for Rome. The first months of 1821 marked a slow and steady decline into the final stage of tuberculosis. John Keats died on 23 February 1821 and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome. His last request was to be placed under an unnamed tombstone which contained only the words, "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." Severn and Brown erected the stone, which under a relief of a lyre with broken strings, contains the epitaph:

"This Grave / contains all that was Mortal / of a / Young English Poet / Who / on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his Heart / at the Malicious Power of his Enemies / Desired / these Words to be / engraven on his Tomb Stone: / Here lies One / Whose Name was writ in Water. 24 February 1821"

3. Work
• Early Poems (1814 to 1818)

Keats's first surviving poem, An Imitation of Spenser, it was written during his residence in Edmonton at the end of his eighteenth year, which would make the date in the autumn of 1813. Now, strongly drawn by ambition, inspired by fellow poets such as Leigh Hunt and Byron, and beleaguered by family financial crises, he suffered periods of depression. His brother George wrote that John "feared that he should never be a poet, & if he was not he would destroy himself". The poem was included in the 1817 volume, which bore on its title-page this motto:—

What more felicity can fall to creature  Than to enjoy delight with liberty?  Fate of the Butterfly.—Spenser.

On Death was assigned by George Keats to the year 1814, and first printed in Forman's edition, 1883.

To Chatterton was first printed in Life, Letters, and Literary Remains, but undated. Keat's admiration of Chatterton was early and constant.

To Lord Byron, the date of December, 1814, is given to this sonnet by Lord Houghton in Life, Letters, and Literary Remains, where it was first published.

Woman! When I Behold thee Flippant, Vain, in the 1817 volume, where this poem was first published, with no title, it is placed at the end of a group of poems which are thus advertised on the leaf containing the dedication: "The Short Pieces in the middle of the Book as well as some of the Sonnets, were written at an earlier period than the rest of the Poems". In the abscence of any documentary evidence, it seems reasonable to place it near the "Imitation of Spenser" rather than near "Calidore".

To Some Ladies, On Receiving a Curious Shell, and a Copy of Verses, from the Same Ladies, were included in the 1817 volume. George Keats says further that the first was 'written on receiving a copy of Tom Moore's "Golden Chain" and a most beautiful Dome shaped shell from a Lady.' The exact title of Moore's poem is "The Wreath and the Chain", and it will be readily seen how expressly imitative these lines are of Moore's verse in general. The poems are not dated, but they are the first in a group stated by Keats to have been 'written at an earlier period than the rest of the Poem'; it is safe to assume that hey belong very near the begining of Keat's poetical career. It is quite likely that they were included in the volume a few years later on personal grounds.

Written on the Day that Mr Leigh Hunt left Prison, either the 2d or 3d of February, 1815, Charles Cowden Clarke, to whom Keats showed the sonnet, writes in his recollections: "This I feel to be the first proof I had received of his having committed himself in verse; and how clearly do I recollect the conscious look and hesitation with which he offered it! There are some momentary glances by beloved friends that fade only with life". The sonnet was printed in the 1917 volume.

To Hope was written in February 1815. On the verso of the holograph copy Keats wrote this fragment: “They weren fully glad of their gude hap / And tasten all the Pleasausnces of joy.” First published in 1817.

Ode to Apollo was written in February 1815 and first published in 1848.

• 1814

As from the darkening gloom a silver dove was written in December 1814. Keats told his friend Richard Woodhouse that “he had written it on the death of his grandmother, about five days afterward”. It was first published in 1876.

Fill for me a brimming bowl was written in August 1814 and first published in 1905.

On Peace was perhaps written in April 1814, or somewhat later. It was first published in 1905.

Stay, ruby breasted warbler, stay was probably written in 1814 and first published in 1876.

• 1815

Lines Written on 29 May, the Anniversary of Charles’s Restoration, on Hearing the Bells Ringing was probably written in 1814 or 1815 and first published in 1925.

Infatuate Britons, will you still proclaim  His memory, your direst, foulest shame?      Nor patriots revere?    Ah! when I hear each traitorous lying bell,  'Tis gallant Sidney's, Russell's, Vane's sad knell,      That pains my wounded ear.

To Emma was probably written in 1815. Keats's brother George copied this poem and addressed it to his later wife, Georgiana Wylie. It was first published in 1883.

To George Felton Mathew was written in November 1815 and first published in 1817.

• 1816

The sonnet O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell was written either in October or November 1815. It was written soon after Keats became a student at Guy’s Hospital. It was Keats's first published poem, appearing as "To Solitude" in Leigh Hunt's Examiner, a radical weekly newspaper, on 5 May 1816, signed 'J.K.' Charles Cowden Clarke refers to it as his friend's red letter day, first proof that Keats's ambitions were valid.

The first volume of Keats verse, was published, which included "I stood tiptoe", “On first looking into Chapman's Homer” and "Sleep and Poetry", both poems strongly influenced by Hunt. It was a critical failure, arousing little interest, although Reynolds reviewed it favourably in The Champion. Clarke commented that the book "might have emerged in Timbuctoo".

On first looking into Chapman's Homer is a sonnet written in October 1816. It tells of the author's astonishment at reading the works of the ancient Greek poet Homer as freely translated by the Elizabethan playwright George Chapman.

The poem has become an often-quoted classic, cited to demonstrate the emotional power of a great work of art, and the ability of great art to create an epiphany in its beholder. It is considered to be his first great poem and one of the greatest sonnets in the language.

This poem is a Petrarchan sonnet, or can be known as an Italian sonnet, divided into an octave and a sestet, with a rhyme scheme of a-b-b-a-a-b-b-a-c-d-c-d-c-d. After the main idea has been introduced and the image played upon in the octave, the poem undergoes a volta, a change in the persona's train of thought. The volta, typical of Italian sonnets, is put very effectively to use by Keats as he refines his previous idea. While the octave offers the poet as a literary explorer, the volta brings in the discovery of Chapman's Homer, the subject of which is further expanded through the use of imagery and comparisons which convey the poet's sense of awe at the discovery.

• 1818

"Hyperion" is an uncompleted epic poem by 19th-century. It is based on the Titanomachia, and tells of the despair of the Titans after their fall to the Olympians. Keats wrote the poem from late 1818 until the spring of 1819, when he gave it up as having "too many Miltonic inversions." He was also nursing his brother Tom

The themes and ideas were picked up again in Keats's The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream, when he attempted to recast the epic by framing it with a personal quest to find truth and understanding.

• 1819

John Keats composed six odes in a short period of time that have become some of his most famous poems. They are united and ordered as a set by various critics to form a greater truth, each depending on the original order. The first five poems were written during the spring, "Ode on a Grecian Urn", "Ode on Indolence", "Ode on Melancholy", "Ode to a Nightingale", and "Ode to Psyche", and "To Autumn" was composed in autumn. The odes were Keats's effort to discuss the relationships between the soul, eternity, nature, and art, which he was busy contemplating throughout 1819.

"Ode on a Grecian Urn" is a lyric ode with five stanzas containing 10 lines each. The first stanza begins with the narrator addressing an ancient urn as "Thou still unravished bride of quietness!", initiating a conversation between the poet and the object, which the reader is allowed to observe from a third-person point of view. By describing the object as a "foster-child of silence and slow time", the poet describes the urn as both a silent object, a theme which reoccurs throughout the poem, and a stone object that resists change.

Throughout the first two stanzas, the speaker addresses the urn as a single object, taking note of its silence at several points as he discusses unheard melodies and tunes heard not by the sensual ear (line 13). In Keats, Narrative, and Audience, Andrew Bennett suggests that the discussion between the poet and the urn at the beginning of the poem leaves the reader to examine more than just the relationship between the two but also his place as a third-party observer. With line 17, the second stanza begins to change tone as the poet shifts his focus from the urn as a whole to the individuals represented in the artwork. The two lovers, whose image the unknown artist has created through his craftsmanship, appear to the poet as a couple who cannot kiss yet do not grow old. Again the narrator discusses the urn in terms of its qualities by saying, "She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss" (line 19), but he also focuses on the inability of the lovers to ever obtain sensual pleasure due to their static nature.

As the poem comes to a close, the narrator once again addresses the urn as a single object. However, his tone becomes sharper as he seeks answers from the work of art that it appears unable to answer. In the final couplet, the poet provides a line for the urn, which complicates the narrative and has generated a multitude of critical responses as to the author's intent: "Beauty is truth—truth beauty / that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know" (lines 49-50).

"Ode on Indolence" comprises six stanzas containing ten lines each. The poem discusses a morning of laziness on the part of the narrator, during which his attention becomes captivated by three figures he sees in a vision. Beginning with an epitaph taken from Matthew 6:28, the poet introduces the theme of indolence through an excerpt of Jesus' suggestion that God provides for the lilies of the field without making them toil. The poem describes the three figures as wearing "placid sandals" and "white robes", which alludes to the Grecian mythology that commonly appears in the 1819 odes. The images pass the narrator three times, which causes him to compare them to images on a spinning urn (line 7). In line 10, the narrator uses the word "Phidian" again as a reference to the Elgin marbles, whose creation was thought to have been overseen by Phidias, a Grecian artist. As the poem progresses, the narrator begins to discuss the intrusion upon his indolence by the figures of Love, Ambition, and Poesy, and he suggests that the images have come to "steal away" his idle days. In the final stanzas, the figure of Poesy is described as a daemon which Helen Vendler suggests poses a direct threat to the idleness the poet wishes to retain. In the final lines, the poet once again rejects the three images: "Vanish, ye phantoms, from my idle spright, / Into the clouds, and never more return!" (lines 39-40) with the intention of once again enjoying the laziness from which the poem obtains its title.

Keats wrote to his friend Sarah Jeffrey: "[T]he thing I have most enjoyed this year has been writing an ode to Indolence." Despite this enjoyment, however, he was not entirely satisfied with "Ode on Indolence", and it remained unpublished until 1848.

"Ode on Melancholy" is the shortest of the 1819 spring odes at three stanzas of 10 lines. Originally, the poem contained four stanzas, but the original first stanza was removed before publication in 1820 for stylistic reasons. The poem describes the narrator's opinions on melancholy and is addressed specifically to the reader, unlike the narrative of many of the other odes. The lyric nature of the poem allows the poet to describe the onset of melancholy and then provides the reader with different methods of dealing with the emotions involved. Using personification, the poem creates characters out of Joy, Pleasure, Delight, and Beauty, and allows them to interact with two other characters which take the shape of a male and his female mistress mentioned (line 17). Keats himself fails to appear as a character in the poem, as there is no mention of the poet himself suffering from melancholy. In the final stanza, the poet describes the mistress as dwelling in Beauty, but modifies the beauty by saying that it "must die" (line 21). Harold Bloom suggests that this provides the poem with a hint of Keats's philosophy of negative capability, as only the beauty that will die meets the poem's standard of true beauty. The image of the bursting of Joy's grape (line 28) gives the poem a theme of sexuality. According to critics, the bursting of the grape alludes to the passing from the moment of ultimate sexual pleasure to the decreased pleasure of a post-orgasmic state.

"Ode to a Nightingale" is the longest of the 1819 odes with 8 stanzas containing 10 lines each. The poem begins by describing the state of the poet, using negative statements to intensify the description of the poet's physical state such as "numbless pains" and "not through envy of thy happy lot" (lines 1-5). While the ode is written "to a Nightingale", the emphasis of the first line is placed upon the narrator rather than the bird, and Helen Vendler suggests that the negation of the reader as a party in the discourse happens just as the song of the nightingale becomes the "voice of pure self-expression". In the third stanza, the poet asks the nightingale to "Fade far away", casting it off just as the narrator in "Ode to Indolence" rejects the Love, Ambition, and Poesy and the poet in "Ode on a Grecian Urn" banishes the figures on the urn to silence. In the fourth stanza, the poet states that he will fly to the nightingale rather than it to him, moving upon the "wings of Poesy", which leaves Walter Jackson Bate to believe that while the poet intends to identify with the bird by describing the poem as being "to" it, the real identification in the narrative exits between the poet and his perceptions of the nightingale's song. In its closing, the poem questions whether the bird's song has been real or part of a dream: "Was it a vision, or a waking dream? / Fled is that music:—do I wake or sleep?" (lines 79-80), and the theme of imagination once again arises as the poet appears, according to Timothy Hilton, unable to distinguish between his own artistic imagination and the song which he believes to have spurred it into action.

The poem was composed at the Hampstead house Keats shared with Brown, possibly while sitting beneath a plum-tree in the garden. According to Keats' friend Brown, Keats finished the Ode in just one morning: "In the spring of 1819 a nightingale had built her nest near my house. Keats felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song; and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast-table to the grass-plot under a plum-tree, where he sat for two or three hours. When he came into the house, I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his hand, and these he was quietly thrusting behind the books. On inquiry, I found those scraps, four or five in number, contained his poetic feelings on the song of the nightingale." Brown's account is personal as he claimed the poem was directly influenced by his house and preserved by his own doing. However, Keats relied on both his own imagination and other literature for sources for his depiction of the nightingale.

"Ode to Psyche" is a 67-line poem written in stanzas of varying length, which took its form from modification Keats made to the sonnet structure. The ode is written to a Grecian mythological character, displaying a great influence of Classical culture as the poet begins his discourse with "O GODDESS!" (line 1). Psyche, a creature so beautiful that she drew the attention of Cupid himself, draws the attention of the narrator, whose artistic imagination causes him to dream of her: "Surely I dream'd to-day, or did I see / The winged Psyche with awaken'd eyes" (lines 5-6). As he relates himself to the mythical character of Cupid, he confuses the god's emotions with his own and imagines that he too has fallen in love with the woman's beauty. The poet does, however, understand the temporal difference between the characters of ancient Greece and his own as he declares, "even in these days [...] I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspired" (line 40-43). In line 50, the poet states "Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane", which, Harold Bloom suggests, implies that the poet himself becomes a "prophet of the soul" as he regards the beauty of Psyche and attempts to place himself within Cupid's personage. According to T.S. Eliot, it is the most prominent ode among the six great odes.

Keats sent the poem to his brother on 3 May 1819 with an attached letter saying, "The following poem, the last I have written, is the first and only one with which I have taken even moderate pains; I have, for the most part, dashed off my lines in a hurry; this one I have done leisurely; I think it reads the more richly for it, and it will I hope encourage me to write other things in even a more peaceable and healthy spirit."

"To Autumn" is a 33 line poem broken into three stanzas of 11. It discusses how autumn is both a force of growth and maturation, and deals with the theme of approaching death. While the earlier 1819 odes perfected techniques and allowed for variations that appear within "To Autumn", Keats dispenses with some aspects of the previous poems (such as the narrator) to focus on the themes of autumn and life. The poem discusses ideas without a progression of the temporal scene, an idea that Keats termed as "stationing". The three stanzas of the poem emphasize this theme by shifting the imagery from summer to early winter and also day turning into dusk.

The poem marks the final moment of his career as a poet. No longer able to afford to devote his time to the composition of poems, he began working on more lucrative projects. Keats's declining health and personal responsibilities also raised obstacles to his continuing poetic efforts.

"The Eve of St. Agnes" is a long poem (42 stanzas), written in 1819 and published in 1820. It is widely considered to be amongst his finest poems and was influential in 19th century literature. The poem is in Spenserian stanzas.

The title comes from the day (or evening) before the feast of Saint Agnes (or St. Agnes' Eve). St. Agnes, the patron saint of virgins, died a martyr in fourth century Rome.Keats based his poem on the superstition that a girl could see her future husband in a dream if she performed certain rites on the eve of St. Agnes; that is she would go to bed without any supper, undress herself so that she was completely naked and lie on her bed with her hands under the pillow and looking up to the heavens and not to look behind. Then the proposed husband would appear in her dream, kiss her, and feast with her.

In the original version of his poem, Keats emphasized the young lovers' sexuality, but his publishers, who feared public reaction, forced him to tone down the eroticism.

• Letters

Over two hundred and forty of Keats's letters survive. His letters, although often poignant, reveal the sense of enjoyment with which he wrote, and reflect the active searching of a youthful and ever-developing mind. They are filled with vigour, quality, and invididuality, making them essential reading for a deeper understanding of Keats's poetry and poetic thought.

During the 20th century they became almost as admired and studied as his poetry, and are highly regarded within the canon of English literary correspondence. T. S. Eliot described them as "certainly the most notable and most important ever written by any English poet."

 

4. Criticism

The early critical opinion of Keats's poetry was not favorable, with the notable exceptions of his close friends and the exiled Percy Shelley.  It is to Keats's credit that he understood the political purpose of the attacks and continued his work with increasing confidence in his own talent.

“But it is easier to think what poetry should be, than to write it.” 
Keats in a letter to his publisher John Taylor, 1818

 

About "Ode to a Nightingale"

At the beginning of the 20th century, Rudyard Kipling referred to lines 69 and 70, alongside three lines from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Kubla Khan, when he claimed of poetry: "In all the millions permitted there are no more than five—five little lines—of which one can say, 'These are the magic. These are the vision. The rest is only Poetry.'”

 In 1906, Alexander Mackie argued: "The nightingale and the lark for long monopolised poetic idolatry--a privilege they enjoyed solely on account of their pre-eminence as song birds. Keats's Ode to a Nightingale and Shelley's Ode to a Skylark are two of the glories of English literature; but both were written by men who had no claim to special or exact knowledge of ornithology as such."

Sidney Colvin, in 1920, argued, "Throughout this ode Keats’s genius is at its height. Imagination cannot be more rich and satisfying, felicity of phrase and cadence cannot be more absolute, than in the several contrasted stanzas calling for the draft of southern vintage […] To praise the art of a passage like that in the fourth stanza […] to praise or comment on a stroke of art like this is to throw doubt on the reader’s power to perceive it for himself."

 

About "Ode to Psyche"

Responding to the poem, Keats's friend Leigh Hunt declared that "When Mr Keats errs in his poetry, it is from the ill management of the good things,--exuberance of ideas. Once or twice, he does so in a taste positively bad, like Marino or Cowley, as in a line in his 'Ode to Psyche'... but it is once or twice only, in his present volume."

Robert Bridges, turn of the 19th-century literary critic, wrote "for the sake of the last section (l. 50 to end), tho' this is open to the objection that the imagery is work'd up to outface the idea—which is characteristic of Keats' manner. Yet the extreme beauty quenches every dissatisfaction. The beginning of this ode is not so good, and the middle part is midway in excellence."

Later, T. S. Eliot thought very highly of Keats's work and wrote "The Odes—especially perhaps the Ode to Psyche—are enough for his reputation."

Kennet Allott, in defending against any possible harsh criticism of "Ode to Psyche", argues that the poem "is the Cinderella of Keats's great odes, but it is hard to see why it should be so neglected, and at least two poets imply that the conventional treatment of the poem is shabby and undeserved".

Allott then cites Bridges and Eliot as views that he sympathizes with, and he believes that the poem "is neither unflawed nor the best of odes, but to me it illustrates better than any other Keats's possession of poetic power in conjunction with what was for him an unusual artistic detachment, besides being a remarkable poem in its own right. This may be another way of saying that it is the most architectural of the odes, as it is certainly the one that culminates most dramatically."

5. Poem dedicated to John Keats

Shelley was introduced to Keats in Hampstead towards the end of 1816 by their mutual friend, Leigh Hunt, who was to transfer his enthusiasm from Keats to Shelley. Shelley's huge admiration of Keats was not entirely reciprocated. Keats had reservations about Shelley's dissolute behaviour, and found some of Shelley's advice patronising (the suggestion, for example, that Keats should not publish his early work). It is also possible that Keats resented Hunt's transferred allegiance. Despite this, the two poets exchanged letters when Shelley and his wife moved to Italy. When Keats fell ill, the Shelleys invited him to stay with them in Pisa but Keats elected to travel with Severn. Despite this rebuff, Shelley's affection for Keats remained undimmed until his death in 1822 when a copy of Keats' works was found in a pocket on his drowned body. Shelley said of Keats, after inviting him to stay with him in Pisa after Keats fell ill: "I am aware indeed that I am nourishing a rival who will far surpass me and this is an additional motive & will be an added pleasure." 

Percy Bysshe Shelley composed “Adonaïs” (also spelled Adonaies) in the spring of 1821 immediately after April 11, when Shelley heard of Keats' death (seven weeks earlier). “Adonaïs”  is a pastoral elegy written by Shelley for John Keats and widely regarded as one of Shelley's best and most well-known works.  The title of the poem is likely a merging of the Greek "Adonis", the god of fertility, and the Hebrew "Adonai" (meaning "Lord").

 

 

                                               Conclusion

“None but the master shall praise us; and none but the master shall blame” might well be written on the fly leaf of every volume of Keats’ poetry; for never was there a poet more devoted to his ideal, entirely independent of success or failure. Keats lived for poetry alone, and, as Lowell pointed out, a virtue went out of him into everything he wrote. In all his work we have the impression of this intense loyalty to his art; we have the impression also of a profound dissatisfaction that the deed falls so far short of the splendid dream.

Keats’ poetry is distinctive for its unusual physical concreteness and its rich appeal to all of the senses. Keats believed that the poet should subordinate his own identity in order to enable the poem’s subject to emerge fully. His ability to capture his subject’s unique characteristics often allows the reader to experience a feeling of direct identification and participation.

Though Keats is known as a sensuous poet, his greatness also lies in the fact that he was an outstanding philosophical poet whose works portray experience as a complexity of unavoidable, inherent contradictions and opposites.

So, we must judge John Keats to be the most promising figure or the early nineteen century, and one of the most remarkable in the history of literature.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bibliography:

Brown, Sue (2009). Joseph Severn, A Life: The Rewards of Friendship. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199565023

Colvin, Sidney (1970). John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics, and After-Fame. New York: Octagon Books.

Goslee, Nancy (1985). Uriel's Eye: Miltonic Stationing and Statuary in Blake, Keats and Shelley. University of Alabama Press. ISBN 0-8173-0243-3

G. M. Matthews, ed. (1995). "John Keats: The Critical Heritage". London: Routledge. ISBN 0-4151-3447-1

O'Neill, Michael & Mahoney Charles (ed.s) (2007). Romantic Poetry: An Annotated Anthology. Blackwell. ISBN 0-6312-1317-1

Wolfson, Susan J. (1986). The Questioning Presence. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. ISBN 0-8014-1909-3