Romantic Poets : John Keats

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.

​Torn between two worlds, Keats battled his own personal life between his engagement to Fanny Browne and the death of his brother. Also the poem was written approximately two years before he died. These life changing events resulted in Keats writing one of his most famous poems, Ode to a Nightingale. This poem is an escape from reality in trying to find a happy place such as the singing of the Nightingale (Fiero 9). The poem is a parallel to Keats thoughts and desires, which are directly connected to his reasoning for writing the poem, its connections to understanding nature as well as its reflection of the human consciousness and natural environment.

Keats’ father Benjamin worked as a waiter at a coffee shop in Greenwich Village and was therefore all too familiar with the struggle to make a better life for you and your family. Although he had a great appreciation for Keats’ work, he discouraged him from making it a career for fear that his son would not be able to support himself. On one occasion he went so far ¬¬ to purchase tubes of oil paint and then gave them to Keats under the false pretense that a starving artist had traded them for a bowl of soup. Fortunately for future readers of his works, Jack was not deterred from his passion for art. When Keats graduated from high school he was awarded the senior class medal for excellence in art. In a cruel twist of fate, his father Benjamin died of a heart attack the day before he was set to receive the award. Although his father never saw Jack receive the award, he learned of his support when asked to identify his father’s body. As he checked his father’s wallet after his death he found several preserved article clippings of all of his achievements. His father was proud of Keats and his work and remained a supporter until his last breath.

Months later his brother George Keats married and immigrated to America, leaving his sickly brother Tom in Keats’s care. Keats worked on his poem "Endymion" for a while and just before its publication, he went on a hiking tour to Scotland and Ireland with his friend Charles Brown. Keats started to notice that he was also coming down with an illness and had to come back early. He came back to a deathly ill Tom and his work in shambles. In December 1818 Tom Keats died. John moved to Hampstead Heath, were he lived in his friend Charles house. While in Scotland with Keats, Charles had let him borrow house to a Mrs. Brawne and her sixteen-year-old daughter Fanny. He fell in love with Fanny and became so absorbed in poetry and love tha he had to give himself a break in autumn of that

Picture this: you have been told by doctors that you have a few years left to live. You will live the rest of your life in increasing pain and difficulty, knowing your death may be right around the corner. This was the exact situation John Keats faced in 1819 at the age of twenty-four. Upon hearing his diagnosis of tuberculosis, which was considered a death sentence at the time, Keats decided to dedicate his life to writing poetry. His work is viewed with high esteem and he is considered one of the great Romantic poets. Two poems Keats wrote in the short time he had left on earth were “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” These poems both tell different stories unrelated to one another. Although their stories are unrelated, both “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn” have unique tones, structures, and themes that should be examined and compared.

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.

Although John Keats’s poetry did not receive favorable critiques during the Romantic Era, his poetry now stands out as some of the best works of the late 1700’s and early 1800’s. Keats’s childhood was marked by a series of unfortunate losses. Keats often battled with depression and turned to writing literature for catharsis. Writing, for Keats, proves to be an avenue to release strong emotions such as sorrow, anger, and frustration, thus cleansing and healing his spirit.

John Keats did not live a long life, only surviving from 1795 – 1821, his original goal in life involved working in the medical field (Motion 76). After some exposure to literature, he soon abandoned his medical passions and shifted his focus onto writing poetry (Motion 328). In fact, he became an apprentice for an apothecary-surgeon in 1811, passed all of his medical exams in 1816 and decided one day that the medical field was just not for him (Motion 47-48). Keats new goal involved surpassing his predecessors in poetry. His true

John Keats was born in 1795 and died in 1821. He lived a short life as

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

Romanticism was a philosophical and literary movement in the middle to late seventeen hundreds. It surfaced as a reaction to the Enlightenment Ideas

John Keats did not have the luxury time that Wordsworth had to look to the past and reminisce about things that were because he knew he did not have long to live. Even from a young age Keats felt his life would be a short one and he so "he applied himself to his art with a desperate urgency". Keats died at twenty-six years old and managed to leave behind some of the greatest poetry ever written. He didn't bother to look toward the future because he knew that he wouldn't live to see it and he didn't look to the past because he decided that it was more important to live in the moment.

The developing truth was considered as Beauty that overcame and even destroyed all other thoughts. Keats did not appear as an intensely emotional or sentimental person, and he often ignored not only of his own but also other people deeper feelings and emotional needs. Tears and bad temper made him puzzle and very uncomfortable. Keats would rather settle differences by talking things out reasonably and rationally, but he tended to ignore or poke fun at any attempt to probe his own or others' inner depths. His genius was not generally remarked during his lifetime or immediately after his death. The critics and readers of nineteenth century appreciated him, though, for the most part, they had only a limited understanding of his work. In the twentieth century, the sensitivity of Keats's poetry expanded and he was praised not only for his seriousness and thoughtfulness but also for his dealing with difficult human conflicts and artistic issues, and for his emotional mental recreation of

Hyperion, Keats shows a remarkable development of his thought about the art of writing and also about the poet who is just like a type of healer to humankind. Keats begins to write Hyperion after returning from Scotland to nurse his dying brother Tom who is suffering from painful tubercular. Tom died on December 1818 and after this shocking event Keats is unable to make any appreciable progress on Hyperion. So due to the emotional disturbance he isn’t quite ready to write his epic. He tries to continue the poem but he only gives the reason in his letters of not writing about it. He writes to the George Keats that “I went on with it a little last night – but it will take some time to get into the vein again” (qtd. in Grant F. Scott 196). Keats’

Keats was an archetype of Romantic poetry and he had struggled throughout his life to be in