Youth And Criticism In Keats's Boyish Imagination

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.

Yeats’ ongoing struggles and his search for truth are evident in the increasingly complex form of his poetry which challenges existing perspectives on mortality as well as philosophy on beauty and art in order to find new ways of perceiving the world. In ‘Wild Swans at Coole’ (1919), Yeats urges his readers to discover the inevitability of mortality through the guidance of his personal questioning; transience of natural beauty and art also encompasses an aspect of his search for truth. ‘Among School Children’ (1928) is a continuation of Yeats’ searching process as he encourages further insights by revealing acceptance of mortality and beauty of unity through sophisticated, modernist manipulation of poetic features.

Of all the themes in poetry, one that is most commonly used and stands out quite a lot is love. T. S Elliot once quoted “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion”. As such, it is no wonder that the themes of unrequited love and despair are very prominent in poem La Belle Dame sans Merci by John Keats. In this poem Keats clearly denotes his personal rebellion against the pains of love and revealed the sad reality that; in pleasure, there is pain. This paper will take a closer look at one of the most prominent themes in La Belle Dame sans Merci; Love and Despair.

John Keats was born on October 31, 1795, in London, England. He loved to write poems, especially about romance and death. “Outside his friend Leigh Hunt 's circle of liberal intellectuals, the generally conservative reviewers of the day attacked his work, with malicious zeal, as mawkish and bad-mannered, as the work of of an upstart vulgar cockney poetaster- John Gibson Lockhart, and as consisting of the host incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language- John Wilson Croker”(John Keats). Many people attacked him and it affected him with his writing. “John Keats died on February

Thomas Keats and Frances Jennings gave birth to John Keats on 31 October 1795 at his grandfather’s livery stable in London, United Kingdom.(“Keats, John (1795-1821).”) His father died in a riding accident when John was only 8 years old. As for John’s mother, she died when he was 14 years old due to tuberculosis.(“Keats, John (1795-1821).”) John had two younger brothers, George and Tom, and a younger sister named Fanny. John and his brother’s George and their younger brother went to John Clarke’s school at Enfield. Keats got guidance, encouragement and a strong friendship from his teacher, Charles Cowden Clarke.(“John Keats”.) Charles was the headmaster and a person of a strong literary interests and radical political sympathies.(“John

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’. Discuss Keats’s exploration of the themes of beauty, truth and imagination in two or more of his works. Prior to the Romantic Movement the prevalent notions in European culture was that the understanding of the universe could be comprehended with the application of rationality and logic. The belief that reason and logic could and should determine all aspects of life arguably underwent a shift of consciousness and was subordinated against the ideas of the Romantic Movement. In place of logic and reason, the Romantics placed a considerable amount of emphasises on emotions, beauty, individuality and in particularly the imagination. An integral part of this change meant that the way in which one perceived

This essay deals mainly with Keats’ concept of Negative Capability, which belongs to the realm of Romantic poetry, and with the question of how Negative Capability, as one operation of the imagination, can help us to tolerate uncertainty and ambiguity. Hence, imagination, nature, and self-awareness are key points we have to go through before everything else, since they are fundamental in the Romantic period and are important to understand

Thomas Keats and Frances Jennings gave birth to John Keats on 31 October 1795 at his grandfather’s livery stable in London, United Kingdom.(“Keats, John (1795-1821).”) His father died in a riding accident when John was only 8 years old. As for John’s mother, she died when he was 14 years old due to tuberculosis.(“Keats, John (1795-1821).”) John had two younger brothers, George and Tom, and a younger sister named Fanny. John and his brother’s George and their younger brother went to John Clarke’s school at Enfield. Keats got guidance, encouragement and a strong friendship from his teacher, Charles Cowden Clarke.(“John Keats”.) Charles was the headmaster and a person of a strong literary interests and radical political

In the context of John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale,” “The Wild Swans at Coole” by William Butler Yeats raises compelling dialogue with Keats’ piece, which suggests that Yeats, to some degree, draws inspiration from John Keats, in that his pose concerning the nightingale becomes a basis and “touchstone” for “The Wild Swans at Coole.” Aside from commonalities concerning avians, both poems share elements of Romanticism, melancholy, feelings of weariness, and other key ideas, images, and plots as “Ode to a Nightingale” and thus, “The Wild Swans at Coole” strengthens Keats’ initial ideas in a harmonic and resonant fashion using its own unique methods. As a response to Keatsian Romanticism, Yeats revises the ideas surrounding transcendence of

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

Born on October 31 1795, Keats was the first born of Frances Jennings and Thomas Keats’ five children (“The Life of John Keats”). As a young boy, he grew up poor. John Keats’ father was a stable keeper and tended to the horses and other animals. One day John Keats received news that would change his life forever (“John Keats Biography”). As Keats’ father was leaving from visiting Keats and his brother George at school, Thomas’s horse slipped on the cobblestone throwing him onto the ground. Causing his father to suffer a skull fracture. Thomas died a few hours later from the injury (“The Life of John Keats”).

“Keats” Keatsian” or even “the Keats “are some of the names used to refer to the poet John Keats. The reason for this are profound and without question. He is and was a great poet and literary influence of the nineteenth century. I have will be terming him as the greatest poet of all time. However before we get into the story of John Keats the poet, and literary visionary. I first want to take you back to the man. His life and his ascension to greatness.

Beyond just notions of love, Keats extends the same logic of the perpetuated emotions to other sentiments. Frequently, a sense of intrigue or uncertainty is maintained within the poem. All throughout, Keats poses many rhetorical questions. In examining one scene he asks “What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?” (8). Although from following questions a general picture can be formed of men pursuing women in a “wild ecstacy” (10), a dominating uncertainty remains. Later, when studying a portrayal of a sacrifice of a cow, Keats poses more questions, asking “What little town by river or seashore / … is empty of this folk this pious morn?” (35-37), and concludes “thy streets for evermore / Will silent be” (38-39).

Through these various resources critics seemed to glean a good understanding of how Keats used imagination in various ways. The first defines imagination as “its capacity to discover, prefigure, or create an unseen truth or reality” (ix).

Scott writes in “Keats's Poetry and the Politics of the Imagination” that Keats himself wished, “among the English poets” (Scott, Keats's Poetry and the Politics of the Imagintion by Daniel P. Watkins, 1991, p. 408) His studies had been much more taken with language and psychology than with history or politics. It was given in Watkins's book that Keats spent more time reading The Examiner than reading Milton and Shakespeare and due to that reason he was more influenced by Hunt than the library of Cowden Clarke (409). At that time, Keats appeared too much like an essayist, a journalist, a commentator, and not enough like a poet. In this light, Watkins reads the extreme individualism and subjectivity of Keats's poetry as "a sign of the bourgeois fragmentation of human life" (409). In his longer poem Endymion, he built a journey for liberating individual power as a response to social disintegration. This involved the active denial of the public world and the ensuing sacrifice of history, society, and women for the designs of the private self. In Isabella, the relations of production and human experience under capitalism; in Hyperion, the true complexity of the social and historical conflict that threatens the Titans; in Lamia, the realities of existence in a market economy; and in Ode on a Grecian Urn there was everything: history, politics, colonialism, the oppression of women, rape, and the destruction of Greece. In this book, Keats's use and misuse of history were also provoking, that was to say, the Marxist machinery was appeared too large and Keats's politics were viewed through an example governed by reductive oppositions, broad definitions of the bourgeoisie, and unchallenged ideological assumptions about the peaceful conditions of the pre capitalist agricultural