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John Keats Poetic Poet

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The poetic life of John Keats is just a period of six years (1814-1820) during which he produced marvelous odes and beautiful poems that rank him as one of the great English poets. Within a short period of twenty six years, his extraordinary poetic achievement took him to a great height, and today he is reckoned as one of the most powerful of the romantic poets. He vis known for such beautiful odes like “Ode to a Nightingale”, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, and “To Autumn”, and poems like The Fall of Hyperion, Hyperion, Endymion. The year 1814 marked the very beginning of Keats’s poetic life. On May 5, 1816 he got his first poem published in ‘The Examiner’, edited by Leigh Hunt, which created a great interest …show more content…

1st I think Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity- it should strike the Reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a Remembrance- 2nd Its touches of Beauty should never be halfway thereby making the reader breathless instead of content .… (Gittings,69-70)
Like Wordsworth Keats too believed in the spontaneity of poetic feelings. Keats, in the same letter wrote the often quoted line: “That if Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.”(Gittings,70) This is nothing but the statement of an intellectually matured person. Abandoning the medical career for the sake of poetry shows Keats’s state of mind clearly. After getting a degree and being fully capable in medical practice, Keats left the profession. He could have earned a handsome amount in that profession. But he gave priority to his thoughts and feelings and did what his heart wanted him to do. It was not because he was a failure but because he wanted mental solace and this he found only through poetry. Another reason behind his leaving the medical career, perhaps, was that he wanted to serve the people through his writings, for he knew that the mental injuries cause lots of harm than that of the physical. His thoughts and ideas are better revealed in his work “The Fall of Hyperion”1819), where he has defined the role of a poet and pointed out the qualities of the

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