John Keats - Life, works, writing style and themes

Appunto di letteratura inglese che tratterà inizialmente la breve ma instensa vita di John Keats e successivamente si focalizzerà sul modo in cui le sue sensazioni, emozioni e sensi vengono espressi e le tematiche da lui trattate.

His youth between love and sufferings

Keats is one of the greatest member of the second generation of Romantic poets.

He was able to fuse romantic passion and cold Neoclassicism, just as Ugo Foscolo.
He was born in London in 1795 from an humble but comfortable family and he was the first of five children.
He lived an unhappy childhood because his father died in 1804 and his mother in 1809 so his siblings and he were taken into custody by their grandmother.
He undertook studying medicine and natural history and then he worked as an apprentice for a surgeon and an apothecary but he took up medicine because he understood his early passion and talent for reading and poetry.
In 1816 he announced his decision to devote his life to writing verse in a beautiful sonnet called “On first looking into Chapman’s Homer” which gave him fame. In the same year he also published his first poem: “Ode to Solitude” recalling Horace.
In 1818 he started to live with his friend and poet Charles Brown in Wentworth Place in Hampstead and in the same period he fall in love with Fanny Browne but he wasn’t able to marry her because of his poverty and illness. He wrote her love letters and the sonnet “Bright Star” and she was an inspirational figure for spiritual and emotional development of the poet.

per ulteriori approfondimenti riguardanti la vita di Keats vedi anche qui

Some of his most important poems

Notwithstanding these difficulties that lead to a worse health and financial severe problems he wrote a series of poems which are nowadays his best known ones:

• The eve of S.Agnes, characterized by romantic features that recreate an atmosphere of superstition, art, ritual and luxury.
• The greatest odes: One of the Nightingale, ode on a greek urn, to autumn, on melancholy, to psyche, where the poet explores relations between pleasure and pain, happens anche melancholy, art and life, reality and imagination.
• The ballad “La belle dam sans merci”, which displays a taste for medieval
  themes.
• Hyperion, which shows the influence of Milton.

per ulteriori approfondimenti su una delle odi, Ode on a Grecian Urn vedi anche qui

Death and late fame

With suggestions from his friends he moved to Rome in 1820 hoping that warmer climate would heal him but it was useless since he died ad 25 years old in February 1821 because of tuberculosis.
When Keats died he was hardly known outside his literally circus and even there he was taken for granted because his works were full of neglect and obscurity.
Many years later there was a revolution. Matthew Arnold, an important Victorian critic, said of Keats that he was as important as Shakespeare and so there was a total reverse of judgment.
Unlike some romantic poet the poems of Keats are not fragments of a continual autobiography because he only consider the story of his like a sort of inspiration for his poetry, non the substance.

per ulteriori approfondimenti sugli ultimi anni del poeta vedi anche qui

Keats: The poet of the senses expressed with his style

Keats’ poetry is inspired by Horace, the Ancient World for instance the movement of Hellenism in Greece and the Middle Ages.
Beside it he reached extraordinary mastery of his verses and exceptional sensivity expressed by sensual imagery using alliterations, personifications, assonances, metaphors, consonances and synaesthesia that express naturally his inner soul, create rhythm and music and moreover underline unsolvable tension between real and joy and ideal and melancholy.
As a matter of fact these figure of speech emphasise the five senses on one hand implying a cognitive process of knowledge on the other allowing the reader to go beyond them.
Keats’ poetry is also imbued with a sense of mortality, melancholy, transience of life and death because it felt the effects of tragic events that happened in his life.

per ulteriori approfondimenti sullo stile di Keats vedi anche qui

Themes in Keats’ poems: Beauty

The poet was convinced that art could make all sorrows and pain “evaporate” because art and imagination are mainly concerned with beauty because it is the only consolation in a life full of sadness and misunderstanding. In fact the memory of beauty is a source of pure joy.
For this reason Keats was used to contemplate the beauty of the world around him, especially the nature.
Also beauty was considered by the poet a spiritual value since it could reveal the essential truth of things. In few words, beauty could be physical and spiritual but both sides of it are interwoven because the first one is the expression of the second one which is eternal and immortal. That means that even if the artist dies the beauty he created through his art will live beyond him.
In the end, beauty is a form of knowledge since it reveals the truth which is the only thing that remain in a world of change.

Themes in Keats’ poems: Negative capability

This capability belongs only to the poet and consists in managing to transform any subject matter into an aesthetic form that appeals to the sense of beauty. This could happen because the poet knows that life is suffering but it’s not necessary to understand or explain the reasons of this pain. As a matter of fact life should not be spent for that because through imagination it can be overcome in order to enter in a better dimension. To do so the poet should embrace completely uncertainties, mysteries and doubts and shed his own identity so as not to be concerned with moral and rational judgements but with opening himself fully to the complex reality around him.

Themes in Keats’ poems: Imagination

It takes two main forms. The first one is the world of his poetry which is artificial because full of unfamiliar and strange things and is remote in space and time. In this way the poet imagines it rather than reflecting his own experience.
The second one consist in poet’s literary works which are a vision of what he would like human life to be like because he is fully worry with pain and misery of his like

per ulteriori approfondimenti sulle tematiche trattate vedi anche qui