A Thing of Beauty: the Poetry of John Keats

1
A Thing of Beauty the Poetry of John Keats

• Prepared for English 2323
• By
• Dr. Brenda Cornell

2
Dates 1795-1821

• Compared to the education travels and personal
  lives of Byron Wordsworth Coleridge and
  Shelley Keats experience was more limited and
  his education seemed more a matter of chance than
  plan. Although trained in medicine he gave up
  his studies and devoted all his energy to writing
  poetry.

3
Views on society politics and religion

• Seems to have had no abstract programmatic
  interest in such subjects. His literary world
  was very limited but not superficial.
• Brief literary career characterized by a chosen
  intensity and concentration of enormous talent
  and energy.

4
Summation of Keats Career

• According to Andre Maurois biographer of Shelley
  and Byron a great man. . .finds himself modeled
  by the function he has to perform. . .of making
  his life a work of art at becoming what the
  world would have him be . . .and so acquires. .
  .in spite of himself and whatever may be his
  intrinsic worth that. . .which makes him a fine
  model for the artist (qtd. in Heath 991).

5
Keats own admission of his role

• At 25 fully aware of his impending death he
  closed a letter to a friend I can scarcely bid
  you good-bye even in a letter. I always made an
  awkard bow (qtd. In Heath 991). His poems and
  letters were the artistic transformation of the
  everyday into the extraordinary. Few poets have
  ever been so definite about the connection
  between life and art.

6
Keats Outline of his Literary Career

• Indulgence in Luxury (youth) poet sees himself
  as a protected spectator becoming aware of the
  possibilities of a nobler life
• Compares himself to Wordsworth if human life is
  a large mansion of many apartments both poets
  have passed through the infant (thoughtless)
  chamber where they were intoxicated with the
  light and the atmosphere. . .saw nothing but
  pleasant wonders and thought of delaying there
  forever in delight (Heath 992). Poetry viewed
  as a means of self-exploration and fulfillment.

7
Last years of life and career

• In 1816 Keats had hoped for 10 years to fulfill
  his poetic apprenticeship but found that he
  had less than 3 years to write four to live.
  Poems show a rapidly fast-growing intensity of
  concern with subject style and purpose. Poems
  are a way of exploring and discovering.

8
Poems of this period

• Characterized by an intensity and urgency to
  explore dreams fantasy reality (as in The Eve
  of St. Agnes)
• At times seems to mock his own seriousness ex.
  Suggests that the destructive ferocity of a
  gentle robin eating a worm is a smaller version
  of the shark attacking its prey

9
Idea of negative capability throughout Keats
poetry

• Even before he was aware of his deteriorating
  heath Keats knew that he must choose between
  half-knowledge or none. He praised negative
  capability as the poets ability to exist in
  uncertainties doubts and mystery without
  necessarily reaching for fact and reason and
  using that experience as subject for poetry (ex.
  When I Have Fears).

10
Appreciation was delayed

• Contemporaries were unsympathetic and unimpressed
  by his poems
• A century later William Butler Yeats would
  write
• I see a school boy when I think of him
• With face and nose pressed to a sweetshop window
• For certainly he sank into his grave
• His senses and his heart unsatisfied
• And madebeing poor ailing and ignorant
• Shut out from all the luxury of the world
• The coarse bred son of livery stable keeper
• Luxuriant song.

11
Works Cited

• Abrams and others. The Norton Anthology of
  English Literature. Volume II. 7th edition.
  NY Norton 2000 823-828.
• Heath William. Major British Poets of the
  Romantic Period. NY Macmillan 1973 991-998.