John Keats (pag 307)
Life and works.
Keats was born in London in 1795 in a modest family.
He was the first of five children; both of their parents died, his father was killed in a riding
accident and his mother died from tuberculosis. After that he decided to study to become a
surgeon in 1810.
Seven years later, he gave up medicine for poetry.
He became soon a friend of the leading writers and artist of the period, like Percy Shelley.
In 1818 he wrote Endymion, a long mythological poem; but this was a hard time for John, his
brother died from tuberculosis and his health deteriorated rapidly.
He fell in love with Fanny Browne, but his poverty, his bad health and his persuit of poetry
made marriage impossible.
However, Keats wrote a series of masterful poems during the following year:
● The Eve of St Agnes, characterised by those features which are conventionally called
“Romantic”; the atmosphere is the one of a symbolic Middle Ages, where
superstition, art, ritual and luxury form a background against which evil threatens
perfect love;
● The great odes (Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, To Autumn, Ode on
Melanchony, To Psyche), where the poet analyse the relationship between pleasure
and pain, art and life, reality and imagination ecc..;
● La Belle Dame sans Merci;
● Hyperion, which shows the influence of Milton in its blank verse.
In 1820 his tuberculosis worsened; he went to Italy to treat it but he died in Rome in
February 1821.
Keats’s reputation.
After his death, Keats was not well known outside his circle of intellectual writers; only after
many years did Matthew Arnold, the most famous Victorian critic of English literature, say
that "he is with Shakespere", and there has never been a more completa judgement.
Keats’s poetry.
Keats is the greatest member of the second generation of Romantic poets who blossomed
early and died young. He is Romantic in his enjoyment of sensation, his love for the Middle
Ages and for the Greek civilisation, his concept of the writer, but at the same time he was
able to fuse Romantic passion and the cold neoclassicism.
Keats’s lyrical poems are not fragments of a spiritual autobiography; it’s true that in the odes
of 1819 he put some deeply personal experiences, however, this are not the substance but
the background.
He uses the the poetical personal pronoun ‘I’ not linked to an individual, but it stands for an
universal “I”. There is no sense of mystery in his poetry and it rarely identifies scenes and
landscapes with subjective moods and emotions.
Keats’s theory of imagination.
For Keats imagination had a supreme value and it was this that made him a Romantic poet.
His idea of imagination was twofold: first, the world of his poetry is artificial, one that he
imagines; second, his poetry comes from imagination, meaning that most of his work, even
most of the odes, is a vision of what he would like human life to be, stimulated by his own
experience of pain and misery.
In Keats's view, the poet has negative capability. By this he meant the poet's capability to
deny his certainties and personality in order to identify with the object which he sees as the
source of his inspiration and the place where truth lives. If the poet manages to rely on this
negative capability, he can find sensations, which are the basis of knowledge leading to
beauty and truth. This allows him to write poetry.
Beauty.
The contemplation of beauty is the central theme of Keats’s poetry. What strikes his
imagination most is beauty, and it is his disinterested love for it that differentiates him from
the other Romantic writers. Keats drew much inspiration from the classical Greek world. To
him the expression of beauty is the ideal of all art. Thus the Greek world lives again in his
verse, re-created and re-interpreted with the eyes of a Romantic.
His first awareness of beauty proceeds from the senses, from concrete physical sensations.
All the senses are involved in this process. This 'physical beauty' is caught in all nature's
forms, in the colours it displays, in the sweetness of its perfumes, in the shape of a flower, in
a woman.
Beauty can also produce a much deeper experience of joy, as Keats affirmed in the opening
line of Endymion, 'A thing of beauty is a joy for ever’. This joy introduces a sort of spiritual
beauty, that is the one of love, friendship and poetry.
Physical beauty is linked to life, enjoyment, decay and death, while spiritual beauty is related
to eternity. Keats identifies beauty and truth as the only true types of knowledge.
