Read complete books and articles on: John Keats

Keats, John - 1795–1821, English poet, b. London. He is considered one of the greatest of English poets.

The son of a livery stable keeper, Keats attended school at Enfield, where he became the friend of Charles Cowden Clarke, the headmaster's son, who encouraged his early learning. Apprenticed to a surgeon (1811), Keats came to know Leigh Hunt and his literary circle, and in 1816 he gave up surgery to write poetry. His first volume of poems appeared in 1817. It included "I stood tip-toe upon a little hill," "Sleep and Poetry," and the famous sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer."

Endymion, a long poem, was published in 1818. Although faulty in structure, it is nevertheless full of rich imagery and color. Keats returned from a walking tour in the Highlands to find himself attacked in Blackwood's Magazine—an article berated him for belonging to Leigh Hunt's "Cockney school" of poetry—and in the Quarterly Review. The critical assaults of 1818 mark a turning point in Keats's life; he was forced to examine his work more carefully, and as a result the influence of Hunt was diminished. However, these attacks did not contribute to Keats's decline in health and his early death, as Shelley maintained in his elegy "Adonais."

Keats's passionate love for Fanny Brawne seems to have begun in 1818. Fanny's letters to Keats's sister show that her critics' contention that she was a cruel flirt was not true. Only Keats's failing health prevented their marriage. He had contracted tuberculosis, probably from nursing his brother Tom, who died in 1818. With his friend, the artist Joseph Severn, Keats sailed for Italy shortly after the publication of Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820), which contains most of his important work and is probably the greatest single volume of poetry published in England in the 19th cent. He died in Rome in Feb., 1821, at the age of 25.

In spite of his tragically brief career, Keats is one of the most important English poets. He is also among the most personally appealing. Noble, generous, and sympathetic, he was capable not only of passionate love but also of warm, steadfast friendship. Keats is ranked, with Shelley and Byron, as one of the three great Romantic poets. Such poems as "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "To Autumn," and "Ode on Melancholy" are unequaled for dignity, melody, and richness of sensuous imagery. All of his poetry is filled with a mysterious and elevating sense of beauty and joy.

Keats's posthumous pieces include "La Belle Dame sans Merci," in its way as great an evocation of romantic medievalism as "The Eve of St. Agnes." Among his sonnets, familiar ones are "When I have fears that I may cease to be" and "Bright star! would I were as steadfast as thou art." "Lines on the Mermaid Tavern," "Fancy," and "Bards of Passion and of Mirth" are delightful short poems.

Some of Keats's finest work is in the unfinished epic "Hyperion." In recent years critical attention has focused on Keats's philosophy, which involves not abstract thought but rather absolute receptivity to experience. This attitude is indicated in his celebrated term "negative capability"—"to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thought."

Bibliography

Keats's letters (ed. by H. E. Rollins, 1958) vividly reveal his character, opinions, and feelings. See his poetical works, ed. by H. W. Garrod (2d ed. 1958); his autobiography, ed. by E. V. Weller (1933); biographies by A. Ward (1963), W. J. Bate (1963, repr. 1979), R. Gittings (1968), A. Motion (1998), and of his last days by J. E. Walsh (2000); studies by W. J. Bate (1945), M. Dickstein (1971), and D. van Ghent (1983).

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15 of the Best Books and Articles on: John Keats

as selected by Questia librarians

1.

John Keats: The Critical Heritage » Read Now
by G. M. Matthews. 430 pgs.

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The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling student and researcher to read the material themselves.
2.

John Keats: Selected Poetry ("Hyperion: A Fragment" begins on p. 121, "Ode to a Nightingale" begins on p. 174, and "Ode on a Grecian Urn" begins on p. 177) » Read Now
by John Keats, Elizabeth Cook. 264 pgs.

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This is an entirely new selection of Keats's finest poetry containing all his best known work as well as a sample of less familiar pieces. Keats published three volumes of poetry before his death at age twenty-five of tuberculosis and, while many of his contemporaries were prompt to recognize his...
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This is an entirely new selection of Keats's finest poetry containing all his best known work as well as a sample of less familiar pieces. Keats published three volumes of poetry before his death at age twenty-five of tuberculosis and, while many of his contemporaries were prompt to recognize his greatness, snobbery and political hostility led the Tory press to vilify and patronize him as a "Cockney poet." Financial anxieties and the loss of those he loved most had tried him persistently, yet he dismissed the concept of life as a vale of tears and substituted the concept of a "vale of Soul-making." His poetry and his remarkable letters reveal a spirit of questing vitality and profound understanding and his final volume, which contains the great odes and the unfinished Hyperion, attests to an astonishing maturity of power.
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3.

Keats's Endymion: A Critical Edition (Includes criticism and text) » Read Now
by John Keats, Stephen T. Steinhoff. 306 pgs.

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". . . Steinhoff in his introduction and notes is as illuminating on the influences of the Elizabethans, Milton, and the early Romantics on Keats as he is in his own reading of the poem."—CHOICE
4.

Life of John Keats (1937) » Read Now
by Charles Armitage Brown. 134 pgs.

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...LIFE OF JOHN KEATS LIFE OF JOHN KEATS By CHARLES ARMITAGE BROWN Edited with an Introduction and...used in the introduction and notes: Colvin. Sidney Colvin, John Keats, His...
5.

Keats's Odes and Contemporary Criticism » Read Now
by James O' Rourke. 193 pgs.

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James O'Rourke examines the ways in which the modern reception to Keats's major odes reveals the investments made in these poems by successive generations of critical schools, particularly New Criticism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and New Historicism. O'Rourke's reading of the odes locates them...
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James O'Rourke examines the ways in which the modern reception to Keats's major odes reveals the investments made in these poems by successive generations of critical schools, particularly New Criticism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and New Historicism. O'Rourke's reading of the odes locates them within the contexts of literary and cultural history and recovers the innovative force of the poems in a way that speaks to the aesthetics and the politics of the present.
While the themes of Keats's odes are characteristically Romantic, they are also very modern. O'Rourke's analysis shows how such familiar Romantic themes as the pathos of solitude ("Ode to a Nightingale"), the inaccessibility of the past ("Ode on a Grecian Urn"), the excess of melancholia ("Ode on Melancholy"), and the beneficence of nature ("To Autumn") become culturally coded as "female", and he demonstrates how they confront the reader with familiar ideas in surprisingly fresh forms. This original study does much to illuminate what Keats's,most virtuosic work has to say about history, nature, gender, ourselves, and each other.
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6.

Word Like a Bell: John Keats, Music and the Romantic Poet » Read Now
by John A. Minahan. 207 pgs.

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...MINAHAN WORD LIKE A BELL JOHN KEATS, MUSIC AND THE ROMANTIC POET...John A., 1956 Word like a bell : John Keats, music and the romantic poet...0-87338-453-9 cloth : alk. I...
7.

Romantic Medicine and John Keats » Read Now
by Hermione de Almeida. 418 pgs.

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Using original research in scientific treatises, philosophical manuscripts, and political documents, this pioneering study describes the neglected era of revolutionary medicine in Europe through the writings of the English poet and physician, John Keats. De Almeida explores the four primary concerns...
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Using original research in scientific treatises, philosophical manuscripts, and political documents, this pioneering study describes the neglected era of revolutionary medicine in Europe through the writings of the English poet and physician, John Keats. De Almeida explores the four primary concerns of Romantic medicine--the physician's task, the meaning of life, the prescription of disease and health, and the evolution of matter and mind--and reveals their expression in Keats's poetry and thought. By delineating a distinct but unknown era in the history of medicine, charting the poet's milieu within this age, and providing close reading of his poems in these contexts, Romantic Medicine and John Keats illustrates the interdisciplinary bonds between the two healing arts of the Romantic period: medicine and poetry.
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8.

Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (Chap. 6 "Keats's Prescience") » Read Now
by Andrew Bennett. 270 pgs.

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This original book examines the way in which the Romantic period inaugurates a tradition of writing that demands that the poet should write for an audience of the future: the true poet, a figure of neglected genius, can only be properly appreciated after death. Andrew Bennett argues that this...
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This original book examines the way in which the Romantic period inaugurates a tradition of writing that demands that the poet should write for an audience of the future: the true poet, a figure of neglected genius, can only be properly appreciated after death. Andrew Bennett argues that this involves a radical shift in the conceptualization of the poet and poetic reception, with wide-ranging implications for the gendering of the poetic canon, and for understanding the work of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and Byron, paradigmatic figures of the Romantic poet.
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9.

Keats's Boyish Imagination » Read Now
by Richard Marggraf Turley. 159 pgs.

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For many readers, John Keats's achievement is to have attainted a supreme poetic maturity at so young an age. Canonical poems of resignation and acceptance such as 'To Autumn' are traditionally seen as examples par excellence of this maturity. In this highly innovative study, however, Marggraf...
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For many readers, John Keats's achievement is to have attainted a supreme poetic maturity at so young an age. Canonical poems of resignation and acceptance such as 'To Autumn' are traditionally seen as examples par excellence of this maturity. In this highly innovative study, however, Marggraf Turley examines how, for Keats, an insistence on 'boyishness' in the midst of apparent mature imagery is the very essence of his political contestation of the literary establishment.
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10.

John Keats and the Culture of Dissent » Read Now
by Nicholas Roe. 316 pgs.

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Keats and the Culture of Dissent sets out to recover the lively and unsettling voices of Keats's poetry, and seeks to trace the complex ways in which his poems responded to and addressed their contemporary world. It offers new research about Keats's early life opening valuable new perspectives on...
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Keats and the Culture of Dissent sets out to recover the lively and unsettling voices of Keats's poetry, and seeks to trace the complex ways in which his poems responded to and addressed their contemporary world. It offers new research about Keats's early life opening valuable new perspectives on his poetry. Two chapters explore the dissenting culture of Enfield School, showing how the school exercised a strong influence on Keats's imaginative life and his political radicalism. Imagination and politics intertwine through succeeding chapters on Keats's friendship with Charles Cowden Clarke; his medical career; the `Cockney' milieu in which Keats's poems were written; and on the immediate controversial impact of his three collections of poetry. The author deftly reconstructs contexts and contemporary resonances for Keats's poems, retrieving the vigorous challenges of Keats's verbal art which outraged his early readers but which was lost to us as Keats entered the canon of English romantic poets.
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11.

Keats, Hunt and the Aesthetics of Pleasure » Read Now
by Ayumi Mizukoshi. 227 pgs.

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This book tackles the interpretative problem of "pleasure" in Keats's poetry by placing him in the context of the liberal, leisured, and luxurious culture of Hunt's circle. Challenging the standard interpretation that attributes Keats's poetic development to his separation from Hunt, Mizukoshi...
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This book tackles the interpretative problem of "pleasure" in Keats's poetry by placing him in the context of the liberal, leisured, and luxurious culture of Hunt's circle. Challenging the standard interpretation that attributes Keats's poetic development to his separation from Hunt, Mizukoshi argues that Keats, imbued with Hunt's bourgeois ethic and aesthetic, remained a poet of sensuous pleasure through to the end of his short career.
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12.

Imagination Transformed: The Evolution of the Female Character in Keats's Poetry » Read Now
by Karla Alwes. 214 pgs.

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...bibliographical references and index. 1. Keats, John, 1795-1821 -- Characters -- Women...Woman as Symbol in the Poetry of John Keats" in Misogyny in Literature:...
13.

Keats: Bicentenary Readings » Read Now
by Michael O'Weill. 175 pgs.

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These essays provide a revitalized sense of the direction in which the major aspects of Keats criticism are heading. Original contributions from distinguished Romanticists cover such issues as the function of Keats's style, the shape of his career, and the relationship between his poetry and...
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These essays provide a revitalized sense of the direction in which the major aspects of Keats criticism are heading. Original contributions from distinguished Romanticists cover such issues as the function of Keats's style, the shape of his career, and the relationship between his poetry and history.
Ranging across Keats's poetry and letters, these articles encompass ground-breaking historical research of the poet's schooling at Enfield, as well as an innovative discussion of his writings about America. The contributors shed new light on Keats's response to art and on his unique handling of the epistolary form. They also reconsider Keats's poetry in fresh readings, discuss his treatment of silence, and explore the "inward Keats" and his post-Romantic, American reception.
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14.

Protest, "Nativism" and Impersonation in the Works of Chatterton and Keats, in Studies in Romanticism » Read Now
by Beth Lau. 21 pgs.

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15.

Cullen, Keats and the Privileged Liar, in Papers on Language & Literature » Read Now
by David E. Goldweber. 19 pgs.

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