John Keats

1. John Keats • Biography • Characteristics of his writing • Selected poems

2. Biography • Keats was born in London in 1795. His parents died while he was still very young. • After his parents' death, his guardians removed him from school and apprenticed him to a surgeon. • While studying medicine he found time to continue his avid reading and creative writing. • After he was qualified to medical practice, however, he decided that the only thing he wanted to be was a poet and thus he abandoned medicine completely. • He published his first volume, Poems, in 1817, and his ambitious allegorical narrative poem, Endymion, in 1818.

3. Biography • His brother Tom died in 1818 and this gave him permanent pain. • From as early as the year 1818 he was continuously troubled by tuberculosis, and this disease finally caused his untimely death in Rome in 1821. • He was buried there in the Protestant Cemetery. Engraved on his tombstone is the inscription “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” • The most famous include On First Looking into Chapman's Homer; Endymion; The Eve of St. Agnes; Ode to Psyche; Ode to Melancholy; Ode on a Grecian Urn; To Autumn and Ode to a Nightingale.

4. Characteristics of his writing • In his poetry, much admired by modern critics, he communicated his ideal of Beauty in lines which fulfill his own poetic definition — that poetry “should strike the Reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts.” • Keats is the poet of the particular detail. He preferred to render in concrete and sensuous images external objects and internal states. In poems like The Eve of St. Agnes, he enables his readers to experience the sights, the sounds, the smell, the taste, the touch of the situation he explored. He was a lyricist of the highest rank.

5. Selected poems • Ode to Melancholy • Ode to a Nightingale • Ode on a Grecian Urn

6. Ode to Melancholy • The theme melancholy linked with joy Melancholy is neither to be avoided nor dulled by poison charms and cures, for “the wakeful anguish of the soul” is a sensation to be treasured in the same way other sensations of living experience are to be know. If sorrow falls, encourage it, nurture it by consorting with beautiful things, that is, “glut thy sorrow or a morning rose/Or on the wealth of globed peonies.” search beauty within unhappy things Melancholy “dwells with Beauty that must die.” Because beauty can't last long in this miserable world, people should find beauty and joy in melancholy. The very joy of living beauty is accompanied by the sad knowledge that it must fade. The image of joy is a youth who is forever waving goodbye. Finally, the poet points out that the highest form of joy is the deepest sense of melancholy. No one can know true melancholy who has not known great joy and no one can know true joy who has not known true melancholy.