John Keats

John Keats (1795—1821), was an English poet of the roman­tic period. Keats's poetry is concerned, in various ways, with joy in the beauty of this world, sorrow over its inevitable passing, and attempts to find bridges between the perishable world we know and the eternal world we imagine. His verse employs unusually rich and vivid images to express his intense feelings.

His life. Keats was born in London on Oct. 31,1795, the son of a livery stable keeper. He attended the Clarke school in Enfield, outside London, and his interest in literature was first aroused there. Keats later studied medicine and passed his mcdical examinations, but he never practiced because he had decided to become a poet. He dedicated his first volume, «Poems» (1817), to his friend Leigh Hunt. Hunt was a journalist, essayist, and poet who held liberal political views. In 1818, Keats published his second volume, «Endymion», a long mythological story in verse. The reviewers for the powerful Tory journals, always eager to attack Hunt or his friends, ridiculed «Endymion». The reviewers snccringly assigned Keats to the «Cockney School of Poetry».

The reviews ruined Keats's reputation and even gave rise to the story that the young poet was literally killed by the hostile recep­tion of his works. Shelley echoed this point in his elegy «Adonais». Adding to Keats's disappointment in 1818 were the death of his brother from tuberculosis and Keats's premonition that he himself would suffer the same fate. Keats began to develop an increasing feeling that poverty and disease would prevent his marrying Fanny Brawnc, whom he deeply loved. Yet from the fall of 1818 through the fall of 1819, Keats experienced an intense burst of creativity, and his final and best volume was published in 1820. But Keats had developed tubereulosis. He traveled to Italy, hoping a warmer climate might improve his health. But it was too late. He died in Rome and was buried there, beneath a stone that bore the bitter inscription he had requested: «Here lies one whose name was writ in water».

His work. Keats's early poetry was uneven. It showed the in­fluence of Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare, but it lacked the consistency these poets displayed. In his 1817 volume, perhaps the only poem of mature stature was the sonnet of excited literary discovery «On First Looking into Chapman's Homer».

In «Endymion», Keats retold the classic story of the shepherd who loved and won the goddess of the moon. Some people think that Keats simply let his imagination run wild, without a clear plan, in this 4,000-line poem. Others see in the poem a symbolic story concerned, like much of Keats's early poetry, with showing how appreciation of the beauty of nature can lead to the understanding of eternal truth. «Endymion» opens with the famous line «А thing of beauty is a joy forever».

In the poetry of his final volume, Keats achieved the rich beauty and superb control of image, story, and language that has earned him lasting fame. «The Eve of St. Agnes» uses brilliant contrasts to tell a Romeo and Juliet-like tale of dangerous young love. The poem ex­plores Keats's favorite theme of the relationship between dreams and the everyday world. «Lamia» shows a young man entranced by love for a beautiful serpent-woman, and raises questions about the nature of reality. The unfinished «Hyperion» shows the influence of the English poet John Milton. The style of its companion fragment, «The Fall of Hyperion», was also somewhat influenced by that of the Italian poet Dante. Together, they deal on a grand scale with the wars of the ancient gods and the principle of power in the universe. The great odes «On a Grecian Urn», «To a Nightingale», «On Mel­ancholy», and «To Autumn» present various aspects of the soul's eternal longing in a world ruled by time. Critics still disagree about what Keats meant at the end of the Grecian Urn ode, where he inter­prets the message of the urn to be «Beauty is truth, truth beauty».

Most of the poems written during Keats's brief maturity dis­play what he called «negative capability». That is, they explore many possibilities of the subjects with which they are concerned, but they do not insist upon any one answer to the enduring prob­lems of human life. The intense experience of life, and not its per­fect understanding, was Keats's main poetic concern.