SECTION 1
Timeline of Keats' Life
John Keats Born:Oct 31, 1795
Born in London, England
Brother Dies:1802
Edward, his brother dies.
Starts School:1803
Begins his studies at a small school in Enfield, England.
Father Dies: Apr 16, 1804
Thomas Keats dies of a fractured skull. John's mother, remarries later the same year.
Mother Disappears:1805
Abandons the family for three and a half years, leaving the children with their grandmother.
Mother Returns:1809
Keats' mother returns to the family, sick with tuberculosis and rheumatism. Keats nurses her.
Mother Dies:Mar, 1810
Frances Jennings Keats dies of tuberculosis.
Leaves School:1811
Abbey pulls Keats from his studies at Enfield and apprentices him to a surgeon in nearby Edmonton.
Starts Medical School:1815
After four years as an apprentice, Keats begins his medical studies at Guy's Hospital in London.
Becomes Serious About Poetry:Oct, 1816
Keats meets the poet Leigh Hunt, who becomes an important influence on his work.
Leaves Medicine:Dec, 1816
Keats decides to abandon his medical career for good so that he can focus on his poetry.
First Poems Published:Mar 3, 1817
Keats' first poetry collection, a volume simply entitled Poems, is published.
Finishes Endymion:Nov 28, 1818
Keats completes Endymion, his first major long poem. The poem begins with the immortal line, "A thing of beauty is a joy forever"
Brother Dies:Dec 1, 1818
Keats' brother Thomas dies of tuberculosis at the age of 19.
Meets Fanny Brawne:1819
After his brother's death, Keats moves in with his friend Charles Brown in the Hampstead neighborhood of London. There, he meets and soon falls in love with his neighbor, Fanny Brawne.
Tuberculosis Appears:Feb 3, 1820
Has a lung hemorrhage, the first serious symptom of the tuberculosis that will eventually take his life.
Final Poems Published:Jul, 1820
Keats' final volume of poetry, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes and Other Poems, is published.
Sails for Italy:Sep 17, 1820
Keats' doctor informs him that his lungs will not survive an English winter. Keats sails to Italy with his friend, the painter Joseph Severn.
John Keats dies:23 February 1821
John Keats dies of tuberculosis at the age of 25 in Rome. He is buried in the Protestant cemetery. Percy Bysshe Shelley writes the poem Adonais as an elegy for him.
Fannny Brawne
Fanny Brawne was the main source of inspiration for Keats’s work. He met her when he moved in with his friend Charles Brown in the Hampstead neighborhood of London, after his brother’s death. There he fell blindly in love with Fanny, a 16 year old girl who he found intellectually and culturally attractive. He fell in love with her ways of speaking and conversing, with her passion for books and knowledge. Their love was later printed in the letters that they sent to each other. These were the most productive years for Keats, where he wrote his best poems, including his famous Odes.
Letter to Fanny Brawne-Love Declaration
“The morning is the only proper time for me to write to a beautiful girl whom I love so much…”
“I almost wish we were butterflies and liv'd but three summer days—three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.”
Letter to Charles Brown
Charles Brown was a close friend of Keats’s. They met in the late summer of 1817, Keats was 21 and Brown 30. Brown took care of Keats when he developed tuberculosis after February 1820; he handled his affairs, paying his bills, writing his letters, etc.
“Write to George as soon as you receive this, and tell him how I am, as far as you can guess; - and also a note to my sister - who walks about my imagination like a ghost - she is so like Tom. I can scarcely bid you good bye even in a letter. I always made an awkward bow.”
SECTION 2
Romanticism
The Romantic period was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in Europe in the end of the 1700’s, peaking during 1800 and 1850, and finally ending in the late 1800’s. It was based on the idea that the Age of Enlightenment was too aristocratic with its norms and structures. It was a reaction to the Industrial Revolution and the rationalization of nature.
In English Literature, the Romantic period in Britain lasted roughly from the 1770’s to the mid 1800’s.
The painting “Liberty Leading the People” by Eugene Delacroix, that commemorates the July Revolution of 1830, is a symbol of the French and their emergence as a nation led by the people against absolutism. Along with the new art and literature movements of Romanticism, new political ideologies were spreading throughout Europe. The French Revolution, as a historical event, was the turning point of these new ideas. The painting above shows how the people were willing to revolt against the old norms and structures of the Enlightenment period.
Key Ideas for Understanding Romanticism
1. Imagination and emotion are more important than reason and formal rules; imagination is a gateway to transcendent experience and truth.
2. Along the same lines, intuition and a reliance on “natural” feelings as a guide to conduct are valued over controlled, rationality.
3. Romantic literature tends to emphasize a love of nature, a respect for primitivism, and a valuing of the common, "natural" man; Romantics idealize country life and believe that many of the ills of society are a result of urbanization.
a. Nature for the Romantics becomes a means for divine revelation (Wordsworth)
b. It is also a metaphor for the creative process—(the river in “Kubla Khan).
4. Romantics were interested in the Medieval past, the supernatural, the mystical, the “gothic,” and the exotic.
5. Romantics were attracted to rebellion and revolution, especially concerned with human rights, individualism, freedom from oppression.
6. There was emphasis on introspection, psychology, melancholy, and sadness. The art often dealt with death, transience and mankind’s feelings about these things. The artist was an extremely individualistic creator whose creative spirit was more important than strict adherence to formal rules and traditional procedures.
a. The Byronic hero
b. Emphasis on the individual and subjectivity.
William Blake-Romanticist writer and artist
Blake’s etched frontispiece for his book America: a Prophecy (1793).
Lord Byron and John Keats
Lord Byron came from a high-class aristocratic family, he was an accomplished and celebrated poet while John Keats was a middle-class poet, who struggled and suffered to the harsh critics of the time. Keats was even told that Poetry was a talent worth of noblemen, not “Cockney” poets. This arose great envy from Keats towards his counterpart, and he even said in a letter to his brother George, “You speak of Lord Byron and me - There is this great difference between us.
He describes what he sees - I describe what I imagine - Mine is the hardest task.”
He describes what he sees - I describe what I imagine - Mine is the hardest task.”
Section 3
What is an Ode in Poetry?
An Ode is a type of lyrical stanza, and its purpose is to praise something or someone that captured the poet’s attention, something specific such as, for example “Ode to Autumn”. Odes usually carry plenty of emotion towards that that the poet is praising.
"My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains"
"Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,"
"O GODDESS! Hear these tuneless numbers, wrung"
"SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness,"
Ode on Melancholy 1819, Spring
"NO, no! go not to Lethe, neither twist"
"One morn before me were three figures seen,"
Ode - (Bards of Passion and of Mirth) 1820
"BARDS of Passion and of Mirth,”
Ode to Fancy
"Ever let the Fancy roam,"
Ode to Apollo
"In thy western halls of gold”
Lines on the Mermaid Tavern
“Souls of Poets dead and gone”
Robin Hood-To a Friend
“No! those days are gone away,”
Themes in Keats Poetry
Inevitability of Death: Keats had strong belief about death, he believed that death happened throughout one's life, maybe every day there were instances of death.
This themes is recurrent in his poetry, in poems such as "Ode on Indolence" or "Ode on Melancholy".
The Contemplation of Beauty: Keats believed that the conteplation of death was a way of delaying the inevitability of it. Poems that tackle this theme could be, "Ode on a Grecian Urn", "Ode to a Nightingale".
Keats also strongly deals with mundane conflicts, these can be seen throughout all of his Odes:
transient sensation or passion / enduring art
dream or vision / reality
joy / melancholy
the ideal / the real
mortal / immortal
life / death
separation / connection
being immersed in passion / desiring to escape passion
Synaesthetic Imagery
A a Synaethesia is a literary device used by writers to express any idea, emotion, character, through the means of appealing to more than sense. The nature of syneathetic imagery, specially in Keats' work, is the combination of senses in order to represent the unity of them, the wholeness of life, in all of its forms.
From Isabella:
And TASTE the MUSIC of that VISION pale. (stanza XLIX)
Inevitability of Death: Keats had strong belief about death, he believed that death happened throughout one's life, maybe every day there were instances of death.
This themes is recurrent in his poetry, in poems such as "Ode on Indolence" or "Ode on Melancholy".
The Contemplation of Beauty: Keats believed that the conteplation of death was a way of delaying the inevitability of it. Poems that tackle this theme could be, "Ode on a Grecian Urn", "Ode to a Nightingale".
Keats also strongly deals with mundane conflicts, these can be seen throughout all of his Odes:
Synaesthetic Imagery
A a Synaethesia is a literary device used by writers to express any idea, emotion, character, through the means of appealing to more than sense. The nature of syneathetic imagery, specially in Keats' work, is the combination of senses in order to represent the unity of them, the wholeness of life, in all of its forms.
From Isabella:
This synaesthesia appeals to three senses: taste, hearing and sight. This mix, cocktail, of senses makes the line juicier, more sensual, provocative.
Ballad
Originally from the French chanson balladée, which means “dancing songs”, a ballad is a narrative form of verse, often set to music. Ballads were popular in Britain from the late middle ages until the 19th century. The purpose of a ballad is told as a song, as a tale, therefore they have a specific form, a pattern of couplets followed by alternate lines, resulting in a rhythmic piece, appropriate for dancing.
"A typical ballad is a plot-driven song, with one or more characters hurriedly unfurling events leading to a dramatic conclusion. At best, a ballad does not tell the reader what’s happening, but rather shows the reader what’s happening, describing each crucial moment in the trail of events. To convey that sense of emotional urgency, the ballad is often constructed in quatrain stanzas, each line containing as few as three or four stresses and rhyming either the second and fourth lines, or all alternating lines."
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5769#sthash.8yRhUELc.dpuf
"A typical ballad is a plot-driven song, with one or more characters hurriedly unfurling events leading to a dramatic conclusion. At best, a ballad does not tell the reader what’s happening, but rather shows the reader what’s happening, describing each crucial moment in the trail of events. To convey that sense of emotional urgency, the ballad is often constructed in quatrain stanzas, each line containing as few as three or four stresses and rhyming either the second and fourth lines, or all alternating lines."
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5769#sthash.8yRhUELc.dpuf
La Belle Dame Sans Merci
AUDIO
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