KEATS

 very short life, died at 25 from tuberculosis consumption  people died of it

Started writing to leave a mark of his existence feeling of beauty and love  intense because he knew
they will not last long  beauty can give him immortality even when he’s dead  poet of beauty
intensity, he knew he’d die young

Fanny Brawn  love story

Between 1818 and 1819 worked on his finest poetry

La belle dame sans merci  “mercy” sense of exotic and mysterious  he falls in love with a femme fatale
(destroys lovers)  real and ideal in conflict his ideal was perfect love and beauty and life but reality was
that he’d die young

On his grave “here lies one whose name was written water”  he didn’t last enough

Who suffers has a lot to say  the more you suffer the more creative you are

Unlike Byron and Shelley not interested in politics, not poet of revolution poet’s subjectivity must
disappear and write in universal  negative capability = the poet welcomes the beauty of an object and
reproduces it without subjectivity  represent perfect beauty

(Aesthetes and decadents Keats is recognized as a forerunner of aestheticism objective perfection

For Keats beauty = ideal to achieve, goddess to adore  he was a romantic full of ideals  while
aesthetes and decadents are epigones, last representatives of romanticism  decadents are different
though, they have lost belief in humanity, no longer looking for absolute, empty inside, but search for
refined objects and extreme sensations, life becomes work of art, more shallow because inside there’s
nothing left)

Beauty needs poet negative capability of grasping beauty and disappear completely, poet is the object of
beauty

Truth through beauty =/= decadents  beauty had a moral function for Keats unlike the aesthetes

Escapist literature escape from reality because it’s unsatisfactory  magic, past, supernatural