John KeatsAn Overview

John Keats lived only twenty-five years and four months (1795-1821), yet his poeticachievement is extraordinary. His writing career lasted a little more than five years (1814-1820), and three of his great odes--"Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," and "Odeon Melancholy"--were written in one month. Most of his major poems were written betweenhis twenty-third and twenty-fourth years, and all his poems were written by his twenty-fifthyear. In this brief period, he produced poems that rank him as one of the great English poets.He also wrote letters which T.S. Eliot calls "the most notable and the most important ever written by any English poet."His genius was not generally perceived during his lifetime or immediately after hisdeath. Keats, dying, expected his poetry to be forgotten, as the epitaph he wrote for histombstone indicates: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." But nineteenth centurycritics and readers did come to appreciate him, though, for the most part, they had only a partial understanding of his work. They saw Keats as a sensual poet; they focused on hisvivid, concreteimagery; on his portrayal of the physical and the passionate; and on his immersion in the here and now. One nineteenth century critic went so far as to assert notmerely that Keats had "a mind constitutionally inapt for abstract thinking," but that he "had nomind." Keats's much-quoted outcry, "O for a life of Sensation rather than of Thoughts!"(letter, November 22, 1817) has been cited to support this view.With the twentieth century, the perception of Keats's poetry expanded; he was and is praised for his seriousness and thoughfulness, for his dealing with difficult human conflictsand artistic issues, and for his impassioned mental pursuit of truth. Keats advocated living"the ripest, fullest experience that one is capable of"; he believed that what determines truth isexperience ("axioms are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses"). The publicationof Keats's letters, with their keen intellectional questioning and concern with moral andartistic problems, contributed to this re-assessment. His letters throw light on his own poetic practices and provide insight into writing in general.

Keats and Romanticism

Keats belonged to a literary movement calledromanticism. Romantic poets, because of their theories of literature and life, were drawn tolyric poetry; they even developed a newform of ode,often called theromantic meditative ode. The literary critic Jack Stillinger describes the typical movement of the romantic ode: The poet, unhappy with the real world,escapes or attempts to escape into the ideal. Disappointed in his mental flight, he returns tothe real world. Usually he returns because human beings cannot live in the ideal or because hehas not found what he was seeking. But the experience changes his understanding of hissituation, of the world, etc.; his views/feelings at the end of the poem differ significantly fromthose he held at the beginning of the poem.

Themes in Keats's Major Poems

Douglas Bush noted that "Keats's important poems are related to, or grow directly outof...inner conflicts." For example, pain and pleasure are intertwined in "Ode to a Nightingale"and "Ode on a Grecian Urn"; love is intertwined with pain, and pleasure is intertwined withdeath in "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," "The Eve of St. Agnes," and "Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil."1

Cleanth Brooks defines the paradoxthat is the theme of "Ode to a Nightingale"somewhat differently: "the world of imagination offers a release from the painful world of actuality, yet at the same time it renders the world of actuality more painful by contrast."Other conflicts appear in Keats's poetry:

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transient sensation or passion / enduring art

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dream or vision / reality

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joy / melancholy

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the ideal / the real

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mortal / immortal

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life / death

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separation / connection

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being immersed in passion / desiring to escape passionKeats often associated love and pain both in his life and in his poetry. He wrote of ayoung woman he found attactive, "When she comes into a room she makes an impression thesame as the Beauty of a Leopardess.... I should like her to ruin me..." Love and death areintertwined in "Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil," "Bright Star," "The Eve of St. Agnes," and "LaBelle Dame sans Merci." The Fatal Woman (the woman whom it is destructive to love, likeSalome, Lilith, and Cleopatra) appears in "La Belle Dame sans Merci" and "Lamia."Identity is an issue in his view of the poet and for the dreamers in his odes (e.g., "Ode to a Nightingale") and narrative poems. Of the poetic character, he says, "... it is not itself--it hasno self--it is every thing and nothing--it has no character--it enjoys light and shade--it lives ingusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, right or poor, mean or elevated..." He calls the poet"chameleon."

Keats's Imagery

Keats's imagery ranges among all our physical sensations: sight, hearing, taste, touch,smell, temperature, weight, pressure, hunger, thirst, sexuality, and movement. Keatsrepeatedly combines different senses in one image, that is, he attributes the trait(s) of onesense to another, a practice called

synaesthesia

. His synaesthetic imagery performs two major functions in his poems: it is part of their sensual effect, and the combining of senses normallyexperienced as separate suggests an underlying unity of dissimilar happenings, the oneness of all forms of life. Richard H. Fogle calls these images the product of his "unrivaled ability toabsorb, sympathize with, and humanize natural objects."

Major Works

Endymion

, while still displaying some of the flaws of Keats's earlier poetry, was alsograced with mythological, poetical, and artistic imagery. The story itself, chronicling the loveof Endymion and Diana, is based in myth, although Keats's knowledge of it was taken fromother English renderings of the myth, as Keats never learned Greek. The primary theme of the poem has been described by critics Samuel C. Chew and Richard D. Altick (1948) as "thequest of a unity transcending the flux of the phenomenal world." Keats's

Hyperion

, publishedin his 1820 volume of poetry, was followed by the incomplete

The Fall of Hyperion

, which isregarded by most critics as Keats's attempt to revise the earlier work.

Hyperion

and

The Fall of Hyperion

, like

Endymion

, focus on mythological themes; the story centers on the Titans'2

fall to the triumphant Olympians. Some critics have suggested that the history of the FrenchRevolution played some role in Keats's construction of the poem. Other works considered to be among Keats's greatest are the odes published in the 1820 volume, including "Ode toPsyche," "Ode to a Nightingale," and "Ode on a Grecian Urn." The poems examine suchthemes as the relationship between art and life, and the nature of human suffering.

Keats's OdesContext

In his short life, John Keats wrote some of the most beautiful and enduring poems inthe English language. Among his greatest achievements is his sequence of six lyric odes,written between March and September 1819--astonishingly, when Keats was only twenty-four years old. Keats's poetic achievement is made all the more miraculous by the age at which itended: He died barely a year after finishing the ode "To Autumn," in February 1821.Keats was born in 1795 to a lower-middle-class family in London. When he was stillyoung, he lost both his parents. His mother succumbed to tuberculosis, the disease thateventually killed Keats himself. When he was fifteen, Keats entered into a medicalapprenticeship, and eventually he went to medical school. But by the time he turned twenty,he abandoned his medical training to devote himself wholly to poetry. He published his first book of poems in 1817; they drew savage critical attacks from an influential magazine, andhis second book attracted comparatively little notice when it appeared the next year. Keats's brother Tom died of tuberculosis in December 1818, and Keats moved in with a friend inHampstead.In Hampstead, he fell in love with a young girl named Fanny Brawne. During thistime, Keats began to experience the extraordinary creative inspiration that enabled him towrite, at a frantic rate, all his best poems in the time before he died. His health and hisfinances declined sharply, and he set off for Italy in the summer of 1820, hoping the warmer climate might restore his health. He never returned home. His death brought to an untimelyend one of the most extraordinary poetic careers of the nineteenth century--indeed, one of themost extraordinary poetic careers of all time. Keats never achieved widespread recognition for his work in his own life (his bitter request for his tombstone: "Here lies one whose name waswrit on water"), but he was sustained by a deep inner confidence in his own ability. Shortly before his death, he remarked that he believed he would be among "the English poets" whenhe had died.Keats was one of the most important figures of early nineteenth-century Romanticism,a movement that espoused the sanctity of emotion and imagination, and privileged the beautyof the natural world. Many of the ideas and themes evident in Keats's great odes arequintessentially Romantic concerns: the beauty of nature, the relation between imaginationand creativity, the response of the passions to beauty and suffering, and the transience of human life in time. The sumptuous sensory language in which the odes are written, their idealistic concern for beauty and truth, and their expressive agony in the face of death are allRomantic preoccupations--though at the same time, they are all uniquely Keats's.3