John Keats

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever: its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness."

" 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' - that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

I. Essential Questions

• How did the aesthetic focus on beauty, divorced from the medieval balances of goodness and truth, prove a problem for the Romantics and all to follow? 
• How do style and sense support one another felicitously, friend? 
• How may seemingly objective secondary sources give us decidedly different impressions of the same person or subject?  How do we respond to this?  

II. Background

"I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections, and the truth of imagination."

"My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk."

Take notes on John Keats

• Years
• Literary Themes
• Life
• Compare Two Encyclopedic Treatments in three to five sentences.

• For More Explore the Keats-Shelley House.  I visited this tiny museum in Rome in the Spring of 2014.  It holds many a sad tale. 

III. Terms

"Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance."

 

Mansion of Many Apartments 

• Theory devised by John Keats stating that people are capable of different levels of thought. He suggested that some have the ability to move through the 'thoughtless chamber' and the 'chamber of maiden thought' to reach more profound states.

Negative Capability 

•  Term coined by John Keats to describe the (true) poet's ability of  'being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason'.

IV. Reading

"Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject."

"La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad" 

"When I have fears that I may cease to be "

"Ode on Melancholy" 

"Bright Star"

"Meg Merrilies"

"Robin Hood" 

John Keats (1795–1821)

V. Journal: Keats

• Simply jot down your impressions after you read each poem (bullets, sentences; whatever you wish).  You have no formal analysis questions.  You will be given an AP prompt from at least one of these poems for essay analysis later.  For now, just get acquainted with the poet. 

  
VI. Further Thoughts 

"I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute."