# INTRODUCTION/EARLY LIFE:-
John Keats, (born October 31, 1795, London, England—died February 23, 1821, Rome, Papal States [Italy]), English Romantic lyric poet who devoted his short life to the perfection of a poetry marked by vivid imagery, great sensuous appeal, and an attempt to express a philosophy through classical legend.
The son of a livery-stable manager, John Keats received relatively little formal education. His father died in 1804, and his mother remarried almost immediately. Throughout his life Keats had close emotional ties to his sister, Fanny, and his two brothers, George and Tom. After the breakup of their mother’s second marriage, the Keats children lived with their widowed grandmother at Edmonton, Middlesex. John attended a school at Enfield, two miles away, that was run by John Clarke, whose son Charles Cowden Clarke did much to encourage Keats’s literary aspirations. At school Keats was noted as a pugnacious lad and was decidedly “not literary,” but in 1809 he began to read voraciously. After the death of the Keats children’s mother in 1810, their grandmother put the children’s affairs into the hands of a guardian, Richard Abbey. At Abbey’s instigation John Keats was apprenticed to a surgeon at Edmonton in 1811. He broke off his apprenticeship in 1814 and went to live in London, where he worked as a dresser, or junior house surgeon, at Guy’s and St. Thomas’ hospitals. His literary interests had crystallized by this time, and after 1817 he devoted himself entirely to poetry. From then until his early death, the story of his life is largely the story of the poetry he wrote.
# LITERARY CAREER:-
Charles Cowden Clarke had introduced the young Keats to the poetry of Edmund Spenser and the Elizabethans, and these were his earliest models. His first mature poem is the sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (1816), which was inspired by his excited reading of George Chapman’s classic 17th-century translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Clarke also introduced Keats to the journalist and contemporary poet Leigh Hunt, and Keats made friends in Hunt’s circle with the young poet John Hamilton Reynolds and with the painter Benjamin Haydon. Keats’s first book, Poems, was published in March 1817 and was written largely under “Huntian” influence. This is evident in the relaxed and rambling sentiments evinced and in Keats’s use of a loose form of the heroic couplet and light rhymes. The most interesting poem in this volume is “Sleep and Poetry,” the middle section of which contains a prophetic view of Keats’s own poetical progress. He sees himself as, at present, plunged in the delighted contemplation of sensuous natural beauty but realizes that he must leave this for an understanding of “the agony and strife of human hearts.” Otherwise the volume is remarkable only for some delicate natural observation and some obvious Spenserian influences.
In 1817 Keats left London briefly for a trip to the Isle of Wight and Canterbury and began work on Endymion, his first long poem. On his return to London he moved into lodgings in Hampstead with his brothers. Endymion appeared in 1818. This work is divided into four 1,000-line sections, and its verse is composed in loose rhymed couplets. The poem narrates a version of the Greek legend of the love of the moon goddess (variously Diana, Selene, and Artemis; also identified as Cynthia by Keats) for Endymion, a mortal shepherd, but Keats puts the emphasis on Endymion’s love for the goddess rather than on hers for him. Keats transformed the tale to express the widespread Romantic theme of the attempt to find in actuality an ideal love that has been glimpsed heretofore only in imaginative longings. This theme is realized through fantastic and discursive adventures and through sensuous and luxuriant description. In his wanderings, Endymion is guilty of an apparent infidelity to his visionary moon goddess and falls in love with an earthly maiden to whom he is attracted by human sympathy. But in the end the goddess and the earthly maiden turn out to be one and the same. The poem equates Endymion’s original romantic ardour with a more universal quest for a self-destroying transcendence in which he might achieve a blissful personal unity with all creation. Keats, however, was dissatisfied with the poem as soon as it was finished.
Romantic poet John Keats's writing style consisted of the use of imagery personification, metaphors, and alliteration. Keats worked to create musical connotation in his works.
Watch this videos for more important information,..
- Ode on a Grecian Urn
- Ode to a Nightingale
- To Autumn
- Ode on Melancholy
- Ode to Psyche
- The Eve of St. Agnes
- Endymion
- Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art
- On First Looking into Chapman's Homer
- Hyperion
- Lamia
- Bright Star: The Complete Poems and Selected Letters
- A Song About Myself
- On First Looking into Chapman's Homer
- Ode on Indolence
- Complete Poems and Selected Letters
- On the Grasshopper and Cricket
- The Poetry of John Keats
> So let's discuss his one of the most famous work "An Ode to a Nightingale",..
# Summary of " Ode to a Nightingale; by John Keats",..
Ode to a Nightingale’ was written in 1819, and it is the longest one, with 8 stanzas of 10 lines each. It was written at Charles Brown’s house, after John Keats(Bio | Poems) was struck by the melancholy singing of a nightingale bird, and it travels through the cabal of the Greek gods, all the while emphasizing the feeling of melancholy – a tragic and often very Greek emotion that Keats would have no doubt learned through his readings.
# ANALYSIS OF "ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE; BY JOHN KEATS",...
The poem itself is very unhappy; Keats is stunned at the happiness of the bird and despairs at the difference between it and its happiness and his own unhappy life. At the start of ‘Ode to a Nightingale,’ the heavy sense of melancholy draws allusions to ‘Ode on Melancholy,’ and Keats – despite the death imagery – does not really want to die. The conflicted nature of human life – a mixture of pain/joy, emotion/numbness, the actual/the ideal, etc. – dominates the poem, so much so that, even at the end, it is unclear whether or not it happened – ‘do I wake or dream?’
It can also be assumed that the heavy imagery of death and sickness could hark back to his experiences taking care of his elder brother, who died of tuberculosis under John Keats’ care. The unhappiness, however, that Keats feels in the poem is not necessarily miserable – Keats writes that he has been ‘half in love with easeful Death’, and describes the joy of listening to the nightingale’s song in a sort of euphoria. It can therefore be considered that Keats would rather forget his unhappiness than die: the references to Hemlock, and Lethe, solidify this argument, as both would blur the memory enough to allow Keats to forget.
There are heavy allusions to mythology: Lethe, the river of forgetting that flows through the underworld; Hippocrene, the fountain of the Muses made by Pegasus’ hooves which brings inspiration; dryads, the spirit protectors of the forest; Bacchus, god of wine and debauchery; Ruth and the corn-field is a reference to the book in the Bible; hemlock, the poison that killed Socrates; Flora, the Roman goddess of nature.
Nature and imagination are shown to be a brief reprieve from human suffering, hence the song of the nightingale, and its impressions. There is also a shift from reality to idealism: Keats says that he would like to drink from ‘a draught of fine vintage’ (a very fine wine) and transport himself to the ideal world that the nightingale belongs to. He states that he will not be taken there by Bacchus and his pards (Bacchanalia, revelry, and chaos) but by poetry and art. Keats then goes on to describe his ideal world, making reference to the ‘Queen Moon’ and all her ‘starry-eyed Fay’ – however, Keats cannot actually transport himself into this world, and the end of the nightingale’s song brings about the end of his fantasy. ‘Country green’, ‘Provencal song’, and ‘sunburned mirth’ all point to a highly fantastical reality, especially considering the status of the world at the time, and the mythological references help to maintain a surreal, dreamlike state throughout the entire poem and to charge Keats’ fantasies with identifiable ideas and figures.
Keats uses the senses heavily in all his poetry, relying on synaesthetic descriptions to draw the reader into ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. It works especially well here because Keats’ fantasy world is dark and sensuous, and he ‘cannot see what flowers are at my feet’; he is ‘in embalmed darkness’. The darkness may have helped his imagination to flourish and furnish his ideal creation, as well as lending a supernatural air to ‘Ode to a Nightingale’.
The drowsiness comes from the longing to flee the world and join the nightingale – to become like the nightingale, beautiful and immortal and organic – and after rejecting joining the nightingale through Bacchanalian activity, he decides that he will attempt to join the bird through poetry. Thus, the rapture of poetic inspiration matches the rapture of the nightingale’s music and thereby links nature to poetry to art (nature as art and beauty, a Romantic ideal). He calls the bird ‘immortal’, thereby also stating that nature will survive man.
The bird’s song translates inspiration into something that the outside world can understand; like art, the nightingale’s singing is changeable and renewable, and it is music that is ‘organic’, not made with a machine. It is art, but art that cannot be viewed and has no physical form. As night shifts into the day – shifting from the supernatural back into fact – the bird goes from being a bird to a symbol of art, happiness, freedom, and joy, back to being a bird. It is contrasted, in the third stanza, by the reality of the world around him – sickness, ill health, and conflict.
The first half of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ represents the way man was – the pleasurable moments of life that overwhelm and leave a gap behind when they’re over; the second half is maturity, and understanding truth, which leads to pleasure but also leads to pain.
In the end, Keats realizes that merging with the ‘embalmed darkness’ means dying, giving himself up completely to death, and becoming one of the worlds that he admires, however, it would mean that he can no longer hear the nightingale and would be farther away from beauty. Neither life nor death is acceptable to Keats. He belongs nowhere.
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