E@6 VIDEOPEDIA PDF

Episode - 42

Dr. Kalyani Vallath

 John Keats
1795-1821
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 Biography
• A poet from the lower class
• Born into an ordinary family
• Eldest of all children, 2 brothers and 1 sister.
• He was attached to his siblings; their parents died in
a very early stage of their childhood.
• Keats went to Clark’s School at Enfield and one of
his friends always motivated him to read more.
• He read Faerie Queene at a young age and wrote
“Lines in Imitation of Spenser”.
• Soon he was apprenticed to Dr. Hammond, A local
surgeon.
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 Early Poems
• In Leigh Hunt’s circle, Keats met the poet and
playwright John Reynolds, painter Benjamin
Haydon and P B Shelley.
• In the “Young Poets” issue of The Examiner Hunt
hails Keats , Shelley and Reynolds as the most
promising writers of their generation.
• His early sonnets were,
❖ “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer”
❖ “I Stood Upon a Little Hill”
❖ “Sleep and Poetry”
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 ❖ Poems: his first volume of poetry dedicated to
Leigh Hunt. Keats was ridiculed as the
“Cockney School” in the Blackwood’s
Magazine.
❖ Letters : Heats traveled from London to the
seaside during this time he wrote letters to his
siblings and friends. These letters were sources
of his thoughts on poetry, philosophy and love.

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 Endymion 1818
• Subtitled: “A Poetic Romance”
• First long narrative by Keats
• Dedicated to Thomas Chatterton
• Opening line, “A thing of beauty is a joy forever”
• A flowery, elaborate allegory of the myth of
Endymion kissed by the Moon Goddess Cynthia on
Mount Latmos.
• Met with scathing criticism because of the use of
ordinary language.

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 Negative Capability
• Keats used to attend Hazlitt’s lectures on
poetry which helped him shape his ideas on
poetry.
• This developed the idea of negative capability;
“when a man is capable of being in
uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any
irritable reaching after fact and reason”.
• A time of intense introspection and transition
marking Keats’s emergence as a poet.
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 Isabella 1818
• Subtitles “The Pot of Basil”
• a narrative poem adapted from a story
in Boccaccio's Decameron.
• It tells the tale of Isabella ,falls in love with Lorenzo,
one of her brothers' employees.
• When the brothers learn of this, they murder Lorenzo
and bury his body.
• She exhumes the body and buries the head in a pot
of basil.
• Her brothers steal the pot and buries Lorenzo’s head.
• Isabella loses her reason and dies.
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 The year 1818
• 1818 was a painful year.
• Tom, Keats’s brother was ill with tuberculosis
and the poet spent much time nursing his
brother.
• Another brother George Keats’s closest
confidante married and departed to America.
• Endymion met with severe attacks in
Blackwood’s Magazine and The Quarterly
Magazine.
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 Keats’s Annus Mirabilis
• Keats was attracted to Isabella Jones an by
1819 he had fallen for Fanny Brawne whom he
couldn’t marry due to financial issues.
• This year he showed astonishing poetic
development and productivity.
• He worked on Hyperion, but gave it up for
having too many Miltonic overtones, so it
remains incomplete.

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 “The Eve of St Agnes”
• Narrative poem in Spenserian stanza.
• Based on the superstition that a girl could see her
future husband in a dream if she performed certain
rites on the eve of St Agnes.
• Borrows plot elements and conceits from Romeo
and Juliet.
• Story of Madeline and Porphyro, star-crossed lovers
meet in the eve of St Agnes.
• But their families do not approve of their love affair.

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 Hyperion
• Based on mythical Titanomachia.
• Modeled on Paradise Lost.
• Bears revolutionary implications.
• A poem that greatly impressed Shelley.
❖ The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream
• “A Vision” is the alternate subtitle
• Unfinished epic
• Influence of Virgil, Dante, Milton

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 Great Odes
• All written in 1819.
❖ “Ode to Psyche”
❖ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
❖ “ Ode on Indolence”
❖ “ Ode to Melancholy”
❖ “Ode to Nightingale”
❖ “To Autumn”

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 “Ode to Nightingale”
• Considered Keats’s greatest ode.
• Opening lines
“My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains”
• The poet envies the happiness of the nightingale.
• Profound meditation on the theme of creativity and
mortality.
• The song of the bird turns his mind to death and
transitoriness of human life.

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 “ Ode on Indolence”
• Describes a morning spent in idleness.
• The poet has a vision of 3 priestesses in white
robes walk with joined hands.
• As he describes his lazy morning, the figures
pass by a third time, he recognizes them as
Love, Ambition and Poesy.
• In the final part of the poem he realizes that he
cannot have all the three in his life.

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 “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
• The poet contemplates on an imaginary antique
visualized in his mind.
• Speculates on the abstract relations of art to life.
• The poem is an example of ekphrasis or a work of art
about another work of art.
• Last lines,
“ Beauty is truth, truth beauty,
that is all/Ye know on earth,
and all ye need to know”.
• The closing lines mean that art can reflect the truth of
human experiences.
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 “ Ode to Melancholy”
• How to cope with melancholy.
• He invokes the mythical river of forgetfulness,
Lethe.
• The poet forbids forgetfulness, suicide and
obsession with death and misery.
• Melancholy is inextricably coupled with joy.
• A rich and complex poem that offers a way of
responding to deep despair.
• It encourages people to embrace sadness by living
within it or by actively acknowledging its presence.

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 “Ode to Psyche”
• The poem does not describe the plot of the
original Cupid and Psyche.
• The poet dreamt Cupid and Psyche asleep in a
bed of grass in the forest.
• He realizes that Psyche has no worshippers or
shrine.
• It is an allegorical meditation on the nature of
love.

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 “To Autumn”
• Theme of transience
• Poet pays homage to a particular Goddess.
• Autumn as a female Goddess often seen sitting
carelessly on the granary floor or watching the
juice from apples oozing from cider-press.
• Three different aspects of the season: its
fruitfulness, its labour and its ultimate decline.

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 La Belle Dame Sans Merci
• Derived from a medieval French poem by
Alain Chartier called La Belle Dame sans
Mercy.
• The knight is enamored by a beautiful lady
who appears as a fairy.
• The fairy condemns a knight to an unpleasant
fate after she seduces him with her eyes and
singing.
• The poem inspired the Pre-Raphaelites.
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 Keats’s Sonnets
❖ “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”

❖ “Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art”

❖ “When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be”

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 Keats: Influence
• Hellenic elements like paganism, love of life,
love of joy etc.
• This contrasted with Hebraism
• Influenced the Pre-Raphaelites, Tennyson and
Arnold.
• Arnold said “He is, he is with Shakespeare”.
• His contemporary writers were Leigh Hunt and
John Clare.
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