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1、,English Literature,Unit 8,Romantic Poets 2 John Keats,John Keats (1795-1821),John Keats,Background Oct.31st,1795:born in Finsbury Pavement near London 1810:became an orphan and taken from school to be an apprentice to a surgeon by his new guardians 1814: left his master and became a hospital studen
2、t in London. 1814: sacrificed his medical ambitions to a literary life. 1816: published his first poem in a magazine. 1817:published about thirty poems and sonnets printed in the volume “Poems“.,John Keats,Productive Years 1817-1821 Winter of 1817:George Keats married and emigrated to America, leavi
3、ng the consumptive brother Tom to Johns care. Apart from helping Tom against consumption, Keats worked on his poem “Endymion“. Just before its publication, he went on a hiking tour to Scotland and Ireland with his friend Charles Brown. First signs of his own fatal disease forced him to return premat
4、urely, where he found his brother seriously ill and his poem harshly criticized. Dec. 1818 :Tom Keats died. John moved to Hampstead Heath, where he lived in the house of Charles Brown. While in Scotland with Keats, Brown had lent his house to a Mrs. Browne and her sixteen-year-old daughter Fanny. Si
5、nce the ladies were still living in London, Keats soon made their acquaintance and fell in love with the beautiful, fashionable girl. Absorbed in love and poetry, he exhausted himself mentally.Autumn of 1819: he tried to gain some distance to literature through an ordinary occupation.,John Keats,Ill
6、ness and Death 1820-1821 An unmistakable sign of consumption in February 1820 however broke all his plans for the future, marking the beginning of what he called his “posthumous life“. He could not enjoy the positive resonance on the publication of the volume “Lamia, Isabella &c.“, including his mos
7、t celebrated odes. In the late summer of 1820, Keats was ordered by his doctors to avoid the English winter and move to Italy. His friend Joseph Severn accompanied him south - first to Naples, and then to Rome. His health improved momentarily, only to collapse finally. Keats died in Rome on the 23rd
8、 of February, 1821. He was buried on the Protestant Cemetery, near the grave of Caius Cestius. On his desire, the following lines were engraved on his tombstone: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.“,1. Life,John Keats was one of the brilliant trio of active Romantic poets in England the son
9、 of a stable keeper,Before Keats was fifteen, both his parents died. His guardian bound him as an apprentice to a surgeon. But he abandoned this career in his determination to be a poet. Later he made friends with Leigh Hunt and other radical writers in London, and published some poems in Hunts maga
10、zine Examiner.,With the help of Shelley, his first collection of poems,Poems by John Keats(1817), was published in 1817.When his second book Endymion appeared in 1818, he gave up medicine for poetry.,Keats was a composer of poetry of wonderful genius. His poems reveal mastery of form and depth of fe
11、eling. But the book was severely criticized because of his democratic views and his close association with the “Cockney School”.,His third and last volume of poetry Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and other Poems appeared in 1820, containing an amazing series of masterpieces, which won Keats h
12、is place among the immortals.,His health was on the brink of collapse. He coughed up a drop of blood; and recognized it as his death Warrant.Shelley was kind enough to invite him to come to Italy in hope of recovery. He went to Rome, where he died on February 23, 1821, at the age of twenty six.,John
13、 Keats,2. Major Works of Keats,During his life time Keats wrote five long poems, two of which Isabella and Hyperion (unfinished) have generally been considered his major works.,It is by his short poems that Keats is known to the majority of present-day readers. Among these exquisite shorter poems we
14、 mention only the four odes: “On a Grecian Urn“ “To a Nightingale“ “Ode to Autumn” “To Psyche,“,he emphasized beauty, because to him, as shown by his “On a Grecian Urn,“ beauty and truth were one and inseparable. To him, “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.“ He is an apostle of beauty. Some of his p
15、oems incline toward “Art for arts sake.“,“Ode to a Nightingale” (1819),Legend of Keats,Poetic Genius Early deathaccomplished so much in 26 years, his desire, the following lines were engraved on his tombstone: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.“,Ode On A Grecian Urn,The Title,The urn of th
16、e title is a decorated vase dating from the classical age of Greece, and many scholars have attempted to discover the particular urn Keats may have had in mind when he wrote his poem. The Townley Vase in the British Museum, where the poet frequently went to see the Elgin Marbles, have all been sugge
17、sted as prototypes, but it is also perfectly possible that Keats had no particular urn in mind for his ode.,Stanza 1,Thou still unravishd bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, Sylvan historian, who canst thus express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme: What leaf-fringd legend haunts about thy shape Of deities or mortals, or of both, In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?,
