JOHN KEATSA poet of

beauty

John Keats, one of the greatest English poets and a major figure in the Romantic movement

born in 1795 in Moorefield, London.

His father died when he was eight his mother when he was 14;

these sad circumstances drew him particularly close to his two brothers, George and Tom, and his sister Fanny.

1803 enters John Clarke’s School at Enfield

Becomes friends with Charles Cowden Clarke

Clarke encourages Keats’s interest in reading

Translation of Virgil’s Aeneid Imitation of Spenser

Keats’s Education

in 1810, he is apprenticed to the apothecary Surgeon.

1815 trains at Guy’s Hospital 1816 begins work as a dresser Continues to read poetry and

publishes his first poem, “Ode to Solitude”

MEDICAL CAREER

Keats publishes his first volume Poems Meets Wordsworth for the first time

1817

Wordsworth

Keats toured the north of England and Scotland. Returning home to nurse his brother Tom, who was ill with tuberculosis. After Tom's death in December he moved into a friend's house in Hampstead, now known as Keats House.

Crisis year for Keats

1818

Met and fell in love with a neighbour, Fanny Branwne.

During the following year ,despite the ill health and financial problems, he wrote an astonishing amount of poetry 'La Belle Dame sans Merci', `Ode to a Nightingale' and `To Autumn'.

1819

Fanny Branwne

In July 1820 his second volume of poems appeared.

In November 1820, Keats and his friend Joseph Severn arrived in Rome, after an hard journey, but by early December he was confined to bed, extremely ill with a high fever.

1820

1821

Friend nursed him devotedly throughout the next few distressing and painful weeks. Keats died peacefully, clasping his friend's hand, on 23 February 1821.

Ode to a Nightingale

John Keats listening to the Nightingale

Ode to a Nightingale - Imagery

The “full-throated ease” leads Keats to the dream of an extremely enjoyable summer of “Dance and Provencal song, and sun burnt mirth”. This image of dance, music, and rollicking fun is heightened by the contrasting reference to human misery, “weariness, the fever and the fret”.

Ode to a Nightingale - Imagery

In this world “where men sit and hear each other groan” is the exact opposite of dance, song and happiness. The image of human misery is very profound when Keats alludes to his brother’s death: "Where youth grows pale , and spectre-thin and dies; Where but to think is to be full of sorrow and leaden-eyed despairs".

Ode to a Nightingale - Mortality

Ode on Grecian Urn

Ode on Grecian UrnIntroduction:

This ode contains the most discussed two lines in all of Keats's poetry

Ode on Grecian Urn

Content: In the first stanza, the speaker stands

before an ancient Grecian urn and addresses it. He is preoccupied with its depiction of pictures frozen in time.

It is the "still unravish'd bride of quietness," the "foster-child of silence and slow time."

He also describes the urn as a "historian" that can tell a story. He wonders about the figures on the side of the urn and asks what legend they depict and from where they come.

Ode on Grecian Urn

Content: He looks at a picture that seems to depict

a group of men pursuing a group of women and wonders what their story could be:

"What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? / What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?"

Ode on Grecian Urn

In the second stanza, the speaker looks at another picture on the urn, this time of a young man playing a pipe, lying with his lover beneath a glade of trees.

The speaker says that the piper's "unheard" melodies are sweeter than mortal melodies because they are unaffected by time.

He tells the youth that, though he can never kiss his lover because he is frozen in time, he should not grieve, because her beauty will never fade.

Ode on Grecian Urn

In the third stanza, he looks at the trees surrounding the lovers and feels happy that they will never shed their leaves.

He is happy for the piper because his songs will be "for ever new," and happy that the love of the boy and the girl will last forever, unlike mortal love, which lapses into "breathing human passion" and eventually vanishes, leaving behind only a "burning forehead, and a parching tongue."

Ode on Grecian Urn

In the fourth stanza, the speaker examines another picture on the urn, this one of a group of villagers leading a heifer to be sacrificed. He wonders where they are going ("To what green altar, O mysterious priest...") and from where they have come.

He imagines their little town, empty of all its citizens, and tells it that its streets will "for evermore" be silent, for those who have left it, frozen on the urn, will never return.

Ode on Grecian Urn

In the final stanza, the speaker again addresses the urn itself, saying that it, like Eternity, "doth tease us out of thought.

" He thinks that when his generation is long dead, the urn will remain, telling future generations its enigmatic lesson: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." The speaker says that that is the only thing the urn knows and the only thing it needs to know.

Ode on Grecian Urn

The final two lines, in which the speaker imagines the urn speaking its message to mankind--"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," have proved among the most difficult to interpret in the Keats canon.

After the urn utters the mysterious phrase "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," no one can say for sure who "speaks" the conclusion, "that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."