The Greatest Literary Ideas : John Keats

In the poem he veers from any pattern and words like, "abject louse," and "maggot," followed his reputation of having an angry diction. His work is completely impulsive which was seen as exotic and passionate, which certainly reflected the period. In his poetry he was said by Norton to stay away from, "making any sense or reason," (Saintsbury, 50).

Construct a close reading of this poem that demonstrates your awareness of the poet’s body of work.

The poem suddenly becomes much darker in the last stanza and a Billy Collins explains how teachers, students or general readers of poetry ‘torture’ a poem by being what he believes is cruelly analytical. He says, “all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it”. Here, the poem is being personified yet again and this brings about an almost human connection between the reader and the poem. This use of personification is effective as it makes the

Homer had a way of illustrating the natural world in exquisite detail. To him, the irregular shapes and bold colors that surrounded him told stories only he could fathom. No one could have guessed that Homer was blind. Every reader makes a choice to either read the top layer of his work and visualize what their brain desires, or absorb the creativity and stand in the middle of his flamboyant visions, not realizing that they have been changed forever. John Keats expresses how Homer’s writing had a way of healing his own ignorance, and changing his life from the moment he read it. Keats writes about how he was most definitely not the same person he was before his exposure to Homer. The poem, “To Homer” by John Keats explicates the idea that although Homer was physically blind, he enabled a man blind with ignorance (Keats), to see the world through his literature.

Ezra Jack Keats, the son of Jewish Polish immigrants, was born in 1916 and brought up in Brooklyn, New York. He was originally named Jacob Ezra Jack Katz, but legally changed his name after WWII. It is speculated that it was a result of anti-semitism at that time. Keats did not have much, if any, formal art training. He painted murals for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) projects in the 1930s and went on to become a comic book illustrator. During World War II, Keats designed camouflage patterns in the US Air Corps. After the war, Keats became a successful artist and illustrator. In 1954, Keats illustrated his first children's book, Jubilant for Sure, by Elisabeth Hubbard Lansing.

Ross Gay’s book Against Which, portrays his poetry to readers allowing them to gain understanding of the cruel world that one lives in. Moreover, the unusual brutalities that people are inevitable confronted with in life. The common denominators within Gay’s poems such as violence, love, fear, and loss allows the reader to visualize characters’ transformation within his poems. In a world of calamity, Gay has created poems that portray the corporal conforming to gender and sex but also human development. Using a reader-response criticism lens, I will be demonstrating my interpretation of Ross Gay’s poems and the meaning that I believe to be a common interpretation of his work. Within, Gay’s poems, “It Starts at Birth” and Angels Out of Reach” one is able to see a pattern of human transformation. By experiencing pain, love, loss, fear, and wisdom one is able to see Gay’s characters evolve through the narrators and readers gaze. In doing so, one is able to reflect on Gay’s poems and gain wisdom themselves.

In literature, it is generally agreed that 'The Nightingale invites the beholder to explore something beyond the merely human '. Both Keats and Finch imitate this concept in 'Ode to a Nightingale ' and 'To the Nightingale ' by using poetic form and language to show the qualities of a bird that inspires them to look beyond the physical and in Finch 's case, challenge the confines of human restriction whilst asserting poetry as a human necessity.

Poetry has a role in society, not only to serve as part of the aesthetics or of the arts. It also gives us a view of what the society is in the context of when it was written and what the author is trying to express through words. The words as a tool in poetry may seem ordinary when used in ordinary circumstance. Yet, these words can hold more emotion and thought, however brief it was presented.

“From the sphere of my own experience I can bring to my recollection three persons of no every-day powers and acquirements, who had read the poems of others with more and more unallayed pleasure, and had thought more highly of their authors, as poets; who yet have confessed to me, that from no modern work had so many passages started up anew in their minds at different times, and as different occasions had awakened a meditative mood.” (2) (paragraph 31).

poem is not merely a static, decorative creation, but that it is an act of communication between the poet and

There are many ways in which one can convey themselves. Marianne Moore uses her speaker's “dislike”(Line 1) of poetry to bring forth the idea that society has dictated how poetry must follow a certain strict and

The Romantic Poet John Keats wrote the following in a letter to his brothers, "I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, upon various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason"¦" (Keats 134). Understanding, Keats' concept of 'Negative Capability' is the key to appreciating Ernest Hemingway's short story, "The End of Something."

Sidney wrote " Since, then, poetry is of all human learnings the most ancient and of most fatherly antiquity, as from whence other learnings have taken their beginnings, since it is so universal that no learned nation doth despise it, nor barbarous nation is without it; since both Roman and Greek gave divine names unto it, the one of “prophesying,” the other of “making,” and that indeed that name of “making” is fit for him, considering that whereas other arts retain themselves within their subjects, and receive, as it were, their being from it, the poet only brings his own stuff, and doth not learn a conceit out of a matter, but makes matter for a conceit; since neither his description nor his end contains any evil, the thing described cannot be evil; since his effects be so good as to teach goodness, and delight the learners of it; since therein—namely in moral doctrine, the chief of all knowledges—he doth not only far pass

There are numerous problems one encounters when attempting to study John Keats’ elusive concept of ‘negative capability’. There has been endless scholastic studies done on the topic, which have resulted in almost as many interpretation of the concept as there are studies. Scholars have often cited an influence from other Romantic authors, dominantly Wordsworth’s treatment of the sublime and Shelley’s expressive emotionalism. Yet, it has been noted that Keats’ intention was to create something great, to create an ideal poetic character who contained the same attributes as Shakespeare. Keats asserts that Shakespeare had a characteristic that separated him from other authors, he possessed ‘negative capability’. In a letter to his brothers, Keats wrote;