JOHN KEATS

JOHN KEATS

He belongs to the second generation of Romantic poets: they all died very young. They produced and published their works during all the 19^th century ( Keats - Odes after 1819).

The Congress marked the end of revolutions and restored the Ancient Regims - feeling of failure - social pessimism (supported by individual pessimism embodied by Keats).

[ Coleridge, who had optimistic faith in the future, ned an utopia in Norther America with some friends.]

He experienced death in his life ( dad, mom and younger brother). He didn't have the oppurtunity to live his brief life enjoying it because of his weakness which led him to an awareness of his destiny - rejection of life.

LIFE ART (refuge sought to escape his sorrow)

Source of sufferings and pains    and its beauty

(anticipation of Aestheticism)

TRANCIENCE IMMORTALITY

Poetry had always been seen since centuries as something catching the fleeting moment.

Inclination (maybe illusion) to find a way to stop time - consequently to his tormented life.

Art's the mean to stop time.

He wrote a lot of letters to his lover because he was aware his illness would never let him meet her. In one of his letters he regreted having a life full of problems: " What for a life of pleasure and sensations rather than of thought!".this sentence is evidence of his complex personality.

Whenever he thought everything was ok something happened . he would have liked to live such a life of pleasures.

John Keats THE MAN John Keats THE POET

wants to live a life full of pleasures

but doomed to live a life of sufferings

Dicotomy might have been solved by the escape from life and refuge in art.

THE REAL THE IDEAL

LIFE ART

TRANCIENCE IMMORTALITY

(caducità)

To combine himself as a man and himself as a poet. Did he make it or not? Was he able to combine these two worlds or not??

ODE ON A GRECIAN URN

Ode: an ode is a rhymed lyric, often in the form of an address, serious in subject, usually exhalted in style and varied or irregular in metre.

He reaches beauty by using poetry as a music which supports images.

Poet is aware of the immobility of the urn ( that's why in the title "on" instead of "to").

ison

Urn ground: silence, purity still unravished bride of quietness

¯ ¯

evidence of un unsolved dicotomy of J.Keats (real ideal)

dicotomy

Parodox  bride unravished

Human passion and love haven't been consumed yet.

Slow time eternity

Foster child   manipulated

Sylvan historian

Tatctile impression with " leaf- frigend legend"

Girls are runnin' - men chase 'em

The poet, using his imagination, wonders what's goin' on.

Unheard melodies - imagined by our imagination. Melodies that we can create by means of our imagination.

Hierarchical order for Keats

Belonging to another world   IMAGINATION

Evanescent / completely abstract    ¯

submitted POETRY

¯

LIFE

LOVERS   desire fulfillment of desire

Something not fulfilled is doomed to grow in intensity. The unattanaible is mostly desirable.

When you desire somethin' and then you get it:

you start being afraid of losing it

you get tired of it ( think 'bout babe and his toy)

never realized kiss

¯ regret of J. Keats

unravished bride

URN cold:

marble

lack of human dimension

the perfection of life implies a loss of the human dimension

sort of regret in it

Effect of human passion - negative

Regret for not having lived life as a man.