Weekly Classics Discussions

John Keats

A thing of beauty is a joy forever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness.
                            -John Keats, Endymion

John Keats, the English romantic poet, born on October 31, 1795 was the eldest son of a stable manager Thomas and his wife Frances Jennings Keats.Throughout his life Keats had close emotional ties to his sister, Fanny, and his two brothers, George and Tom. When Keats's father died in 1804, Frances Keats moved the children to her mother's home immediately and remarried, but the marriage soon proved to be a failure.

During his schooling, Keats became close to the headmaster John Clarke, and his son, Cowden. Keats's love for literature, and his association of the life of imagination with the politics of a liberal intelligentsia, began to take shape here. Literature for him was more than a dreamy refuge for a lonely orphan: it was an area for energetic exploration, "realms of gold," as he later wrote, tempting not only as a realm of idealistic romance but also of a beauty that enlarges our imaginative sympathies. Charles introduced the young Keats to poems of poetry of Edmund Spenser and the Elizabethan poetry which proved to be the earliest models for Keats's poetry. His first mature poem, "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" ( (1816), a sonnet , was inspired by his detailed and excited reading of George Chapman's classic 17th-century translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey.In the year 1817, Keats left London briefly for a trip to the Isle of Wight and Canterbury and began work on Endymion, his first long poem. The poem which appeared in 1818 is divided into four 1,000-line sections, and its verses are composed in loose rhymed couplets.

The year of 1819 proved to be a major breakthrough for Keats. It was during this year that all of his great poems were written. The poems include : "Lamia," "La Belle Dame sans Merci ( a ballad)" , "The Eve of St. Agnes," the great odes -"On Indolence," "On a Grecian Urn," "To Psyche," "To a Nightingale," "On Melancholy," and "To Autumn"-, and the two versions of Hyperion. Keats's distinctive achievements are garnered by his odes. All the odes were composed between March and June 1819 except "To Autumn," which is from September.

There is no more to record of Keats's poetic career. The poems "Isabella," "Lamia," "The Eve of St. Agnes," and Hyperion and the odes were all published in the famous 1820 volume, the one that gives the true measure of his powers. It appeared in July, by which time Keats was evidently doomed. He was continuously ill throughout 1819, and by the beginning of 1820 the symptoms of tuberculosis were quite clear. Percy Bysshe Shelley, hearing of his condition, wrote offering him hospitality in Pisa, Italy, but Keats did not accept. When Keats was ordered south for the winter, Joseph Severn undertook to accompany him to Rome. They sailed in September 1820, and from Naples they went to Rome, where in early December Keats had a relapse. Faithfully tended by Severn to the last, he took his last breath in Rome. Despite a young death, Keats's influence can be found throughout the Victorian age.

Keats approached the relations among experience, imagination, art, and illusion with penetrating thoughtfulness, with neither sentimentality nor cynicism but with a delight in the ways in which beauty, in its own subtle and often surprising ways, reveals the truth.

Discussion Question

How does the poems of John Keats reflect a paradox ? 

How does dreaminess play a role in Keats's poems, and what concept of his does such dreaminess reflect? 

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Resources : 

Wikipedia 

Poetry Foundation