John Keats View On Alienation And Ecstasy The real John Keats is far more interesting than the languid aesthete of popular myth. Readers of his poetry get a very distinct feeling that Keats believes that a person spends most of his time being alienated from the society, experiencing only a few moments of ecstasy. The poets life explains much of the leading themes of his poetry (which seem to be alienation and ecstasy).
Most of his best work appeared in one year. Keats was born in London as the son of a livery-stable manager. He was the oldest of four children, who remained deeply devoted to each other. After their father died in 1804, Keatss mother remarried but the marriage was soon broken.
She moved with the children, John and his sister Fanny and brothers George and Tom, to live with her mother at Edmonton, near London. She died of tuberculosis in 1810. At school Keats read widely. He was educated at Clarkes School in Enfield, where he began a translation of the Aeneid. 1811 he was apprenticed to a surgeon-apothecary. His first poem, Lines in Imitation of Spenser, was written in 1814.
In that year he moved to London and resumed his surgical studies in 1815 as a student at Guys hospital. Next year he became a Licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries. Before devoting himself entirely to poetry, Keats worked as a dresser and junior house surgeon. In London he had met the editor of The Examiner, Leigh Hunt, who introduced him to other young Romantics, including Shelley. His poem, O Solitude, also appeared in The Examiner. Keatss first book, Poems, was published in 1817. Sales were poor.
The Term Paper on John Keats Life Poets Poem
Cy Reynolds English 1 H John Keats was born on October 31, 1795. He was the oldest of five siblings. One of them, Edward died at infancy. He lived a happy childhood in North London. His father Thomas Keats and his mother Frances Jennings owned a livery business called the "Swan and Hoop." John was a very unique boy. He would answer people by rhyming the last word of his answer to the last word to ...
He spent the spring with his brother Tom and friends at Shankin. It was about this time Keats started to use his letters as the vehicle of his thoughts of poetry. They mixed the everyday events of his own life with comments with his correspondence. Among others T.S. Eliot considered the letters in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933) certainly the most notable and most important ever written by any English poet. Endymion, Keatss first long poem appeared, when he was 21. It told in 4000 lines of the love of the moon goddess Cynthia for the young shepherd Endymion.
Keatss greatest works were written in the late 1810s, among them Lamia, The Eve of St. Agnes, the great odes and two versions of Hyperion. He worked briefly as a theatrical critic for The Champion, spent summer of 1818 touring the Lakes, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and after returning to London he spent the next three months attending his brother Tom, who was seriously ill with tuberculosis. After Toms death in December, Keats moved to Hampstead. In the winter of 1818-19 he worked mainly on Hyperion and The Eve of St Agnes. The fragmentary Eve of St Mark was composed during a visit to his friend Charles Wentworth Dilkes parents and relatives in Sussex. In 1819 Keats finished Lamia, and wrote another version of Hyperion, called The Fall of Hyperion.
A Wedgwood copy of a Roman copy of a Greek vase inspired Keats famous poem Ode on a Grecian Urn. In 1820 appeared the second volume of Keats poems. It gained a huge critical success. However, Keats was suffering from tuberculosis and his poems were marked with sadness partly because he was too poor to marry Fanny Brawne, the woman he loved. In a letter from 1819 he wrote I love you more in that I believe you have liked me for my own sake and nothing else. I have met with women whom I relay think would like to be married to a Poem and given away by a Novel.
When his condition gradually worsened, he sailed for Italy with his friend, the painter Joseph Severn, to escape Englands cold winter. Declining Shelleys invitation to join him at Pisa, Keats went to Rome, where he died at the age of 25, on February 23, 1821. Keats did not invent his own epitaph, but remembered words from the play Philaster, or Love Lies-Ableeding, written by Beaumont and Fletcher in 1611. All your better deeds / Shall be in water writ, one of the characters says. Keats told his friend Joseph Severn that he wanted on his grave just the line, Here lies one whose name was writ in water. In spite of early harsh criticism, Keats reputation grew after his death.
The Essay on Lines Of Iambic Pentameter Sonnet Love Poet
A poet called Petrarch developed the sonnet form in Italy. It is a poem made up of 14 lines of iambic pentameter. An Italian rhyme scheme is ABBA ABBA in the first octave. The sestet can be CDC DCD which was the original scheme, or CDE CDE. The sonnet was brought to England by Sir Thomas Wyatt and The Earl of Surrey who visited Italy during the Renaissance. Sonnets were originally wrote in Latin ...
The poets letters were published in 1848 and 1878. Keatss works have influenced among others The Pre-Raphaelites, Oscar Wilde and Alfred Tennyson. Some later poets have attacked Keats and the Romantics: for T.S. Eliot Byron was a disorderly mind, and an uninteresting one and Keats and Shelley were not nearly such great poets as they are supposed to be. (Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia) It is probably fair to say that Keats live was never a completely happy one. He was constantly loosing the people he loved: his entire family and the woman he loved. That is probably why he felt alone most of his life.
This solitude and alienation found resemblance in most of his poems, including La Belle Dame Sans Merci. The name of the poems means the beautiful woman without mercy. Its the title of an old French court poem by Alain Chartier. (Merci in todays French is, of course, thank you) The poet meets a knight by a woodland lake in late autumn. The man has been there for a long time, and is evidently dying. The knight says he met a beautiful, wild-looking woman in a meadow. He visited with her, and decked her with flowers.
She did not speak, but looked and sighed as if she loved him. He gave her his horse to ride, and he walked beside them. He saw nothing but her, because she leaned over in his face and sang a mysterious song. She spoke a language he could not understand, but he was confident she said she loved him. He kissed her to sleep, and fell asleep himself. He dreamed of a host of kings, princes, and warriors, all pale as death. They shouted a terrible warning – they were the womans slaves. And now he was her slave, too.
Awakening, the woman was gone, and the knight was left on the cold hillside. The poems final lines are And this is why I sojourn here, Alone and palely loitering, Though the sedge is witherd from the lake, And no birds sing. They probably carry the very meaning of the poem. Keats sort of tells the reader that life is mostly about alienation. Once in a while, however, a beautiful woman appears among someones misery and solitude. This beauty brings moments of ecstasy to the one it appeared to, even if he becomes the slave of it afterwards.
The Essay on The Poem By Edmund Spenser Is A Poem Of True Love
One day I wrote her name upon the strand, But came the waves and washed it away: Agayne I wrote it with a second hand, But came the tyde, and made my paynes his pray. “Vayne man,” sayd she, “that doest in vaine assay. A mortall thing so to immortalize, For I my selve shall lyke to this decay, and eek my name bee wyped out lykewize.” “Not so,” quod I, “let ...
In the Eve of St. Agnes Keats seems to be concentrating more on the moments of ecstasy than on alienation. The first thing that comes to the readers eyes is the title of the poem. Eve symbolizes a night, which allows women to have a sexual fantasy fulfilled without losing their innocence. Keats does not try to transcend sexuality, but what he seems trying to show is that the fulfillment of sexual desire is something leads to transcending the world. The setting of the poem concentrates on the inside vs. outside world and this is when the alienation theme comes in.
Keats is pointing that everything left inside dies eventually. In other words, alienation and solitude is dooming a person to stagnation the only thing that is worthwhile living for is the rear occasion of pleasure and ecstasy. Another poem of Keats, On First Looking Inot Chapmans Homer, is truly beautiful. It tells about how Keats travelld in the realms of gold, but found the truth in Chapmans Homer. This againg, comes back to the topic of authentisity and reality, which for Keats are found in alienation and ecstacy. It is difficult not to appreciate the poetry of John Keats.
Not only for his outstanding beautiful poetic style, but also for putting so much deep meaning in each line he wrote. His poems are not just about beauty, women and other worldly things, but they are much more about what all those things lead to. Keats, through his poetry, expresses his feeling of alienation. This alienation he experienced, for the most, because of constant losses of those he loved. His illness also contributed to him being alone and cut off the world at times. The poems, however, do not leave a negative, pessimistic feelings in readers minds.
Keats underlines that even for the most lonely people there still is hope, hope to feel ecstasy and be happy, even for the short moments, in this life.
Bibliography:
www.John-Keats.com – general information about Keats www.online-literature.com/keats/ – biography of John Keats www.plagiarist.com – texts of all Keats poems Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia, Microsoft Corporation, 2002 Keats, Andrew Motion, New York, New York, Schults and Sons, 1998.
The Term Paper on Keats Ode Poems
This essay will work in unifying themes of Keats’ poems, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode to Melancholy, Ode to Psyche, Ode to Indolence, and Ode on a Grecian Urn. The paper will analyze these poems and then apply thematic links. In Keats’ poem Ode to a Nightingale, the first stanza begins with the narrator describing heartache. The following emotions each illustrate this main point through the use of ...
