John keats

 About the Author

English Romantic poet John Keats was born on October 31, 1795, in London. The oldest of four children, he lost both his parents at a young age. His father, a livery-stable keeper, died when Keats was eight; his mother died of tuberculosis six years later. After his mother''s death, Keats''s maternal grandmother appointed two London merchants, Richard Abbey and John Rowland Sandell, as guardians. Abbey, a prosperous tea broker, assumed the bulk of this responsibility, while Sandell played only a minor role. When Keats was fifteen, Abbey withdrew him from the Clarke School, Enfield, to apprentice with an apothecary-surgeon and study medicine in a London hospital. In 1816 Keats became a licensed apothecary, but he never practiced his profession, deciding instead to write poetry. 

His Major Poetic Works

1) Endymion

Endymion was a poem based on the Greek myth of Endymion & the moon goddess. In this poem, Keats described his imagination in an enchanted atmosphere-a lovely moon-lit world where human love & ideal beauty were merged into one. Endymion marked a transitional phase in Keats's poetry, though he himself was not satisfied with it.



2) Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Ages, &Other Poems

In July 1820, the third & best of his volumes of poetry, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Ages, &Other Poems, was published, The three title poems all deal with mythical & legendary themes of ancient, medieval, & Renaissance times. At the heart of these poems lies Keats's concern with how the ideal can be joined with the real, the imagined with the actual & man with woman.



3) Hyperion

The unfinished long epic includes two fragments, Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, modeling on Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dante’s Purgatorio in The Divine Comedy separately. Its theme is the conflict between the old and the new, and the story is derived from Greek mythology. The poem describes the struggle for power in heaven, the displacement of the old Titans headed by Saturn by the new generation of gods, the Olympians headed by Zeus.


4) Odes:

Of all the short poems by Keats, his odes and sonnets are the most important. The dominant theme of these poems is that the world of nature is beautiful, the realm of art and poetry is wonderful, but the human society is full of miseries. For example, in the poem Ode to a Nightingale, Keats identifies himself with the ideal beauty and hopes that the song of the bird will help him to escape from the world of suffering, where “to think is to be full of sorrow”, into the world of eternal happiness.



"Ode on an Grecian Urn"

It shows the contrast between the permanence of art & the transience of human passion. The poet has absorbed himself into the timeless beautiful scenery on the antique Grecian Urn: the lovers, musicians & worshippers on the Urn exist simultaneously & for ever in their intensity of joy. They are unaffected by time, stilled in expectation. This is at once the glory & the limitation of the world conjured up by an object of art. The urn celebrates but simplifies intuitions of ecstasy by seeming to deny our painful knowledge of transience & suffering.



"Ode to a Nightingale"

It expresses the contrast between the happy world of natural loveliness & human world of agony. Here the aching ecstasy roused by the bird's song is felt like a form of spiritual homesickness, a longing to be at one with beauty. The poem first introduces joy & sorrow, song & music. Death & rapture which free him into the world of dream. By combining a tingling anticipation with a lapsing towards dissolution, Keats manages to keep a precarious balance between mirth & despair, rapture & grief. Inspired by the nightingale's song, his thoughts now ascend from the transfigured physical world, through the imagined ecstasy of death, to the timeless present of the nightingale's song. The ultimate imaginative view of "faery lands forlorn" evaporates in its extremity as the full associations of the word "toll" the poet back from his near-loss