One Must Imagine Keats Happy Keats is obsessed with beauty in his poetry. Keats always creates a a beautiful object out of some mundane and poor existence. Most notably, in “Isabella, or Pot of Basil”, Isabella buries the head of her lost lover, Lorenzo, inside a pot of basil. Keats approaches beauty in a way fundamentally different from Lake Poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge. For Wordsworth, his poems “will be found to carry with them a purpose” (Norton, 295). Therefore, in Wordsworth’s pomes beauty is secondary, and he exhibits beauty only in order to show the purpose of his poem. For instance, in “Lines Written in Early Spring”, the beauty of Nature described in the first five stanzas only elevates the speaker to a high enough position and hence prepares readers for the revelation of the final stanza “What man has made of man” (Norton, 280). For Keats, it seems that his poems do not have a purpose; if there is one, the purpose can only be Beauty, as Keats discloses in a letter to his brothers, “the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration” (Keats, 232). However, curiously Keats likes to break the beautiful object he creates in his poems. For instance, Isabella’s brothers steal her pot of basil; Apollonius exorcises Lamia. In “Eve of St. Agnes”, although the protagonists Madeline and Porphyro escape from the fate of death, the poem still ends with the morbid deaths of Angela and the Beadsman. If Keats’ goal is to
The similarities between the poems lie in their abilities to utilize imagery as a means to enhance the concept of the fleeting nature that life ultimately has and to also help further elaborate the speaker’s opinion towards their own situation. In Keats’ poem, dark and imaginative images are used to help match with the speaker’s belief that both love and death arise from fate itself. Here, Keats describes the beauty and mystery of love with images of “shadows” and “huge cloudy symbols of a high romance” to illustrate his belief that love comes from fate, and that he is sad to miss out on such an opportunity when it comes time for his own death.
Life’s mysteries are best stated in writing. Some mysteries are revealed, while others remain unknown forever. John Keats, one of England’s greatest poets, published several poems, including one of his most famous ones in 1819, “Ode on A Grecian Urn” (Keats 247). Keats was a renowned poet during the British Romantic period. Romantic literature focused on beauty and emotions. So, what is the significance of the scenes depicted on the mysterious urn? Is the urn simply a masterpiece of art with emphasis only on physical beauty? In the poem, “Ode on A Grecian Urn”, John Keats creates mysterious scenes on a Greek urn to contrast between everlasting art and human life. Keats contrasts both worlds through the urn’s elaborate description, the theme of personal relationships, and the ultimate message of beauty, with significant relevance to modern times.
After a four week survey of a multitude of children’s book authors and illustrators, and learning to analyze their works and the methods used to make them effective literary pieces for children, it is certainly appropriate to apply these new skills to evaluate a single author’s works. Specifically, this paper focuses on the life and works of Ezra Jack Keats, a writer and illustrator of books for children who single handedly expanded the point of view of the genre to include the experiences of multicultural children with his Caldecott Award winning book “Snowy Day.” The creation of Peter as a character is ground breaking in and of itself, but after reading the text the reader is driven to wonder why “Peter” was created. Was he a vehicle for
Although the basic mood and intended idea of these poems may seem to be the same, the two ways in which these two messages are portrayed are different from one another through diction and imagery. Keats’ poem is much more romantic and enchanting, using eloquent symbols containing imagery such as when he says, “When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face, /Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,”(5-6). This complex symbol of imagery, complemented by the use of the word “love” twice in the poem, contribute to the poem being characterized as more romantic. On the other hand,”Mezzo
Keats seems to find true beauty in everything; every view or perspective he has. In Ode to a Nightingale, the beauty is thinking that maybe death gives some one a chance not to have any worries, but knowing that there is always light at the end of a tunnel, and showing that there is always some one’s own Nightingale to put life into perspective when change is needed. Yes, the Nightingale in the poem might represent darkness in a way in which Keats thinks of death throughout many scenarios, but Keats still imagines this Nightingale as a beautiful creature in a beautiful world, “To cease upon the midnight with no pain, while thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad in such an ecstasy! Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain- to thy high requiem become a sod” (Lines 56-60). Keats is not envious of the Nightingale, but just wants to be like it and have a life of
Wordsworth’s poetry lectures on nature while Keats’ poetry playfully frolics in the meadow. “The Eve of St. Agnes” stimulates intensity and personal connection because the fragrances, flavors, and feel of the scene come alive. The night is “honeyed,” the fair virgins are “lilly white” (VI), and the air resounds with “timbrels” and “faery fancy” (VIII). Madeline admires the “languid moon” and her interests spring to life as a “full-blown rose” (528). Objects in nature represent human characteristics. Renaissance folklore inspires the lines: “While legioned faeries paced the coverlet/And pale enchantment held her sleepy-eyed” (XIX). Mystic revelry and description allows the reader to feel apart of Keats’ poem.
Romanticism refers to a cultural, literary, philosophical and artistic era during the mid to late 18th century in response to the Enlightenment ideals. Romantics favoured more emotional themes which influenced romantic poetry. The Eve of St. Agnes written by John Keats is one such poem to come out of this era and it is clearly evident that Keats uses a number of different words and phrases in this poem that display his romantic ideals and that have certain significance within the poem itself. This essay will have a brief analysis of John Keats’ romanticism ideals within The Eve of St. Agnes, a summary of the poem and it will also look at three particular words within the poem, argent, gules and morphean. John Keats uses the metrical romance
Readers of Keats’s story begin to realize that the fear of a young death is a demon that haunts us all. This was Keats’s goal as a romantic writer: to connect with the reader, to portray his ideas in the form of art, and to make the reader see from his point of view. With his use of colorful figurative language, such as repetition, imagery, and personification, Keats accomplishes his goal. The reason that Keats is so successful in painting a clear picture is because he “uses his imagination to write” (King). By writing his poem in the form of a “Shakespearean sonnet consisting of three quatrains” (King), Keats, like any great artist, clearly states the point he is trying to make. Apprehension of a young demise is a plague that haunts us all. In “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to be,” Keats takes our hands and reassures us that we are not
Michael O’Neil claims that Keats greatest poetry thrives on its knowledge of contrast, its feeling for light and shade. The contrast that these two poems provide for each other allow the reader to appreciate their similarities, and likewise analyze their differences. The greatest contrast between the two is in the type of beauty they describe. In Ode to a Nightingale, the beauty is in the birds song, which lasts eternally beyond the lifetime of the bird. Thus depicting the eternal glory of nature, and the persistence of creation. The latter poem is displaying the beauty of the urn, a figure in a permanent reality–unchanging and existing beyond
Keats draws the reader into his fantasy settings and dreamlike state of desire. Keats was obsessed with blurring the boundaries of dreams versus reality and the consequences of those boundaries. This is seen more in this poem than any of his other works. It is not known why he had this obsession, but maybe the dream world allowed him to forget everyone he lost due to illness, or maybe prevented him from thinking about his own illness and future demise. While writing this poem, Keats knew he was ill, because of his previous medical experience, and because he lost his mother and brother to tuberculosis, so he knew the symptoms.
When reaching the second part of the poems, the reader starts to see the differences between the poems. Keats starts to talk about the “Cloudy symbols and the “shadow”. It seems that Keats might believe that love is a predetermined life event, seeming as though he is disappointed that he might of missed out on an
John Keats was a well established English poet in the early 19th century. His work is greatly influenced by his family, studies, political views, and life experiences. Keats was born October 31st, 1795 in a stable to his devoted parents, Thomas and Frances Keats (15). Before Keats’s twentieth birthday he would experience many hardships from the passing of both of his parents as well as his grandmother. Thomas Keats died in 1804 after an accident occurred while riding his horse, leaving John Keats as the ‘man’ of the house at the young age of nine. Less than five years passed before Frances Keats fell ill and passed after contracting tuberculosis. At a young age Keats experienced great loss and suffering that would linger with him for the entirety
The works written by Keats illustrate his way of thinking through massive imagery and sweet beauty. Keats didn’t receive a grand amount of formal learning, in fact he learned very little that way. After focusing on his aspiring career as a surgeon, he put poetry aside, however, he found himself losing his touch in surgery, therefore, he moved back to his beloved poetry.
The twenty-four old romantic poet John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” written in the spring of 1819 was one of his last of six odes. That he ever wrote for he died of tuberculosis a year later. Although, his time as a poet was short he was an essential part of The Romantic period (1789-1832). His groundbreaking poetry created a paradigm shift in the way poetry was composed and comprehended. Indeed, the Romantic period provided a shift from reason to belief in the senses and intuition. “Keats’s poem is able to address some of the most common assumptions and valorizations in the study of Romantic poetry, such as the opposition between “organic culture” and the alienation of modernity”. (O’Rourke, 53) The irony of Keats’s Urn is he likens
Keats, on the other hand, uses the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” to express his perspective on art by examining the characters on the urn from either an ideal or realistic perspective. In the beginning, Keats asks questions regarding the “mad pursuit” (9, p.1847) of the people on the Grecian urn. As the Grecian urn exists outside of time, Keats creates a paradox for the human figures on the urn because they do not confront aging but neither experience time; Keats then further discusses the paradox in the preceding stanzas of the poem. In the second and third stanza, Keats examines the picture of the piper playing to his lover “beneath the trees” (15, p.1847) and expresses that their love is “far above” (28, p.1848) all human passion. Even though