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John Keats Poetry
John Keats Poetry
(1795 - 1821)
• Keats: strong and enduring influence on the subsequent generations of English poets
• His poetry: the image of an extreme sensitivity constantly challenged by tragedies
• All his poetry is traversed by the consciousness that in this life, which he called “the vale of soul-making,” pain and trouble
are necessary to “school an intelligence and make it a soul”
• In compensation: a focus on sensation and emotion that makes his work unique – Keats: the poetry of sensation (“O
for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts”)
• Born in a lower middle class family in London – he lacked the opportunities for education that his fellow Romantics
had – e.g. he had not access to the Greek classics except in translation
• voracious reader – became acquainted with the work of Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Shakespeare, Dryden, Dante,
Boccaccio, Ariosto and Tasso
• His Letters: impressions of these readings – they reveal a subtle critical mind
• Tragic death by consumption, the “family disease,” at less than 26
• No English poet achieved so much within such a short interval – his masterpieces: all written in the interval of one year,
at the age of 23-4
• 1818: Endymion – his first major poetic attempt – the mythological tale of the love between the beautiful shepherd
Endymion and Cynthia, the Moon Goddess – theme of the pursuit of love
• Not very well received by the critics – Keats admitted that it was a test of his powers of imagination, the work of a stage
in life in which “the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted.”
• Flaws: insecure style and weakness in narrative
• Merits: richness of descriptive detail, the luxuriance of colour and music, the enchanted atmosphere and the sudden
moments of vision – a revelation of Keats’s remarkable poetic sensitivity and his worship of Beauty
• Opening lines:
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness.
1820: the volume which demonstrates Keats’s incredible maturation as a poet, containing his best poetry: Lamia, Isabella,
The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (it included the Odes on Melancholy, on a Grecian Urn, and to a
Nightingale)
IRONIC CONSCIOUSNESS in Keats’s Odes.
The concept of NEGATIVE CAPABILITY
Ode to a Nightingale
• Hearing the song of the nightingale, the poet experiences an ecstatic mixture of pain and pleasure
• The consciousness that the paradisiac realm of art cannot entirely remove the acute sense of the finitude and
transience of our actual life, where beauty and love are subject to change and decay.
• The bird’s song stands for immortal beauty, offering an escape from “the weariness, the fever and the fret” of this world
• However, the end of the poem admits almost ironically that Fancy, this “deceiving elf,” “cannot cheat so well / As she is famed
to do”
• The poet returns sadly to the consciousness of having a mortal human self, of never being able to fully identify himself
with the nightingale
[Stanza 6] Darkling I listen; and, for many a time,
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.
• Ode to a Nightingale and Ode on a Grecian Urn: perfect illustration of Keats' IRONIC CONSCIOUSNESS
• Tension between his confident assertion of the principle of "beauty in all things" and his doubts concerning the power
of the Imagination to offer compensation in a world "full of Misery and Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness and Oppression", in a world
"Where but to think is to be full of sorrow" (Ode to a Nightingale)
• Both the nightingale's song and the urn: symbols of the eternity of art
• They, succeed in “teasing” the poet "out of thought" momentarily, i.e. in suspending the painful consciousness of his
mortal finitude
• For the poet, the realm of art is deathless ("all breathing human passions far above"), but this belief only increases the poet's
awareness of the contradictions of human experience
• The painful sense of life as flux, as a process in which pleasure and pain alternate or cannot be "unperplexed" [i.e.
disentangled, kept separated] from each other
• These two odes illustrate Keats‘s struggle to achieve "a vision that would comprehend all experience, joy and suffering,
the natural and the ideal, the transient and the eternal" (Douglas Bush)
• His achievement consists precisely in avoiding making a final claim – he holds together romantic enthusiasm and
philosophical irony.
• Keats’s great odes display that quality which he found necessary "to form a man of achievement, especially in literature":
NEGATIVE CAPABILITY
• In one of his letters (1817), Keats explains Negative Capability as that state in which "a man is capable of being in
uncertainties, mysteries and doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason"
• Actually, all Keats’s important poems are examples of the poet’s “Negative Capability”
• Among his poems of mediaeval inspiration, Lamia and La Belle Dame sans Merci, for instance, may also be read as
allegories of the relationship between reality and imagination, as unresolved debates on the power of poetry to
compete with ordinary vision
THE EVE OF ST. AGNES – based on a folk superstition: if on Saint Agnes’ eve (the 20th of January) young girls should
observe certain ceremonies on going to bed, they would “soft adorings from their loves receive / Upon the honey’d middle of the
night.”
• The action: modelled on one of the archetypal incidents of folklore – a young lover stealing away his bride from a
hostile environment
• The accompanying idea that love is always threatened by death and destruction.
• It prompts meditation on the relationship between ideal, dream happiness and the possibility of happiness in
the real world.
Madeline decides to respect this ritual – while she dreams of her lover, he comes out of hiding and tries to awaken her by
playing the lute. As she opens her eyes, she experiences a momentary disappointment at the juxtaposition of his pale
figure and her dream of him.
The pain of awakening is however dispelled, and love reaches its fulfilment, but the two lovers, like another Romeo and
Juliet, have to face the chill hostility of their relatives. They elope to a new home, through a wintry wind and an icy
sleet – an illustration of the medieval heroic concept of passion successfully braving danger.
Critical disagreement in regard to the poem’s theme and intention – it has been interpreted as:
a condemnation of "cold philosophy", which "will clip an Angel's wings, /Conquer all mysteries by rule and line",
and "unweave a rainbow“
a condemnation of passion, of all-absorbing feeling and of the irresponsible plunging into sensation
a condemnation of the split between reason and feeling.
All these divergent opinions confirm Keats’s idea of “Negative Capability” – what looks like confusion in the
poem's message should be read in fact as the poet's effort to encompass in his story a range of contradictory
attitudes without reconciling them
LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI – published posthumously – the folk theme of the bewitching woman whose love
brings destruction
• Inspired by a mediaeval verse romance and, later, ballad: Thomas the Rhymer
• The title: borrowed from a medieval French courtly romance by Alain Chartier (15th century)
• A knight is enthralled by a strange lady and taken to her “elfin grot,” where he has a dream vision of a long procession
of pale kings, princes and warriors brought to ruin by the “merciless lady.”
• When he wakes up, the knight finds himself alone on “the cold hill’s side”, and ever since he has been wandering alone
and dejected in a desolate autumnal landscape.
• The poem creates with a remarkable economy of means the sense of loss, mystery and terror
• It may be read as another inquiry into the “truth” of ideal visions, or as a questioning of the powers of poetry to
offer a rewarding alternative to the reality of pain.
• There are ambiguities in Keats’s poem which prevent us from deciding whether the Knight's nightmare is caused by
the lady's rejection of him or by his own emotional inability to greet the presence of Spirit in his life.
2. O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, 5. I made a garland for her head,
So haggard and so woe-begone? And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
The squirrel’s granary is full, She looked at me as she did love,
And the harvest’s done. And made sweet moan
8. She took me to her Elfin grot, 11. I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
And there she wept and sighed full sore, With horrid warning gapèd wide,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes And I awoke and found me here,
With kisses four. On the cold hill’s side.
9. And there she lullèd me asleep, 12. And this is why I sojourn here,
And there I dreamed—Ah! Woe betide!— Alone and palely loitering,
The latest dream I ever dreamt Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
On the cold hill side. And no birds sing.”
Keats’ Letters to his friends and brothers reveal a very personal philosophy of poetry – a glimpse into his thoughts about the
nature of poetry and the creative process – highly influential for later poets
Some of the concepts and ideas in these letters have had a long-standing critical importance
The principle of intensity in art
"The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with beauty
and truth" (1817)
The truth of Imagination and the beauty of passions – the principle of sincerity in art
“I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination. What the Imagination seized as
Beauty must be truth - whether it existed before or not - for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love: they are all in their sublime,
creative of essential Beauty.”
Men of genius vs. men of power
“Men of Genius are great as certain ethereal Chemicals operating on the Mass of neutral intellect – but they have not any individuality, any
determined Character - I would call the top and head of those who have a proper self Men of Power.” (1817)