If you will be given a chance to write something on your

tombstone, before you die, what would that be?

Here lies one whose name was writ in water
 JOHN KEATS
The great beauty of Poetry is, that it makes every thing every place interesting - '
John Keats to his brother George, 1819
*Portrait of John Keats by William Hilton
BACKGROUND
• Born in London on 31 October 1795
• Eldest of Thomas and Frances Jennings Keats’s four children
• Died at the age of 25, on 23 February 1821
LIFE’S EXPERIENCES
• Mother and Father died at an early age
• Very poor, money not on their side
• Crisis between becoming a surgeon and a poet
• Wrote for six years and four years of publishing
• Works were not generally well received by critics during his life
• Unsuccessful love
• Died because of tuberculosis, one he acquired from his
brother
WRITER
• He had no formal literary education
• Wrote for six years
• He published only fifty-four poems, in three slim volumes and a
few magazines.
• “The Cockney School of Poetry”
• The generally conservative reviewers of the day attacked his
work as mawkish and bad-mannered, as the work of an upstart
“vulgar Cockney poetaster” (John Gibson Lockhart), and as
consisting of “the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth
language” (John Wilson Croker)
LIST OF WRITINGS
•Poems (1817)
•Endymion: A Poetic Romance (1818)
•Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other
Poems (1820)
ROMANTIC WRITER
Douglas Bush noted that "Keats's important poems are
related to, or grow directly out of...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 with
death in "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," "The Eve of St.
Agnes," and "Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil."
ROMANTIC WRITER
Other conflicts appear in Keats's poetry:
• transient sensation or passion / enduring art
• dream or vision / reality
• joy / melancholy
• the ideal / the real
• mortal / immortal
• life / death
• separation / connection
• being immersed in passion / desiring to escape passion
ROMANTIC WRITER
Keats often associated love and pain both in his life and in his
poetry. He wrote of a young woman he found attractive,
"When she comes into a room she makes an impression the
same as the Beauty of a Leopardess.... I should like her to ruin
me..." Love and death are intertwined in "Isabella; or, the Pot
of Basil," "Bright Star," "The Eve of St. Agnes," and "La Belle
Dame sans Merci." The Fatal Woman (the woman whom it is
destructive to love, like Salome, Lilith, and Cleopatra)
appears in "La Belle Dame sans Merci" and "Lamia."
ROMANTIC WRITER
• In Lamia, Keats gives a shape-shifting, changeling serpent who is
exposed by a human for who she really is. This has fairytale
elements from the main character, the serpent, who can change
forms, magically, but is exposed by a symbol of logic, reason,
and truth.
• In The Eve of St. Agnes, a superstitious girl, Madeline, believes that
her lover will meet her on a special, seaside night. This work is a
fairytale-like reference to fate and destiny. More or less, her lover
meets her that night even though it’s by “rigged” means.
ROMANTIC WRITER
For the Romantics, Wordsworth and Shelly focus much on nature
and finding “the sublime,” and Keats touches on that in Ode to a
Nightingale, but he also talks about the Hippocrene, which is a
fountain allegedly formed by Pegasus hooves and gave power to
poets when they drank from it. (Merriam-Webster) Also from that
poem is a line that shows a very magical action/idea: “And with
thee fade away into the forest dim” (Keats 2013) Keats has a
strong connection with the unknown, magical realm. That, or he
has a deep desire to be connected to it.
LITERATURE 1 INFO
LITERATURE 1 ROMANTICISM
LITERATURE 1 QUOTES
 “I have left no immortal work behind me—nothing to

make my friends proud of my memory—but I have lov’d

the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time

I would have made myself remember’d.”

 “Thy name was writ in water—it shall stand:

And tears like mine will keep thy memory green”

- Oscar Wilde, “The Grave of Keats”

REFERENCES
https://www.poemhunter.com/john-keats/biography/
https://britlitsurvey2.wordpress.com/2013/11/08/john-keats-representation-in-the-
romantics/
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/john-keats
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/keats.html