John Keats: biography, personal life, creativity and quotes

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

John Keats is the greatest English Romantic poet. In addition to wonderful poems, wonderful letters were written from his pen, addressed to friends and relatives, and representing not only philological, but also artistic interest. The biography of John Keats is very short, but he left behind a large poetic legacy. In such a short time, and he worked for only about six years, Keats was able to become an epoch-making poet. The works created by him have entered the annals of English literature and are considered textbooks.

All Keats' work is marked by the stamp of a genius and was a new stage in world poetry. The poet, anticipating his early departure, worked on the edge of his own abilities, completely devoting himself to creativity.

Childhood

The poet John Keats, whose poems called on the reading public to turn their eyes to heaven and helped them soar in soul to the great ancient gods and heroes, was born on October 31, 1795 in the modest and poor family of Thomas Keats, the ownerstables. The family lived in London and had four children, of whom John was the eldest. The brothers were named George (1797-1741) and Tom (1799-1818), the sister was Fanny (1803-1889). Parents died early: father - in 1804, mother - in 1810. There were few savings in the family, but they were still enough to allow the brothers to graduate from a prestigious school, and the eldest, John, to receive a medical education. One of the teachers of the school where they studied, Charles Clark, became friends with John and took care of him comprehensively during his studies. It was he who introduced Keats to the ancient masterpieces of English literature, taught him to feel the fabric of poetry subtly and introduced him to romanticism.

Youth

From 1811 to 1815, John Keats was an intern at a London hospital, after which he passed the exam for the right to practice medicine. But life turned out differently. By his own admission, during important operations, he felt that his thoughts hovered in areas far from medicine. He, holding a scalpel in his hands, composed poetry. It could not go on like this for a long time, and therefore Keats did not connect his life with medicine, but set off on the free bread of a free poet.

By that time he was already well versed in literature, highly appreciated Edmund Spenser and Homer and attended a poetry circle. Among the members of this circle, pejoratively called the "School of the Plains", was the critic Lee Hunt, who later became a friend and publisher of Keats.

Lee Hunt

Lee Hent (1784-1859) apart from criticism was engaged in journalism, dramaturgy and poetry. He was an honest and courageous man. Hepublished his own journal, in which he furiously denounced the vices of society and those in power. For his statements, Hunt was even imprisoned for two years. This created an aura of a martyr around him and greatly increased the number of admirers. The poet John Keats wrote his first sonnet in 1815 as a greeting on Lee Khent's release from prison.

Hent was the first to see a brilliant talent in Keats and in every possible way contributed to his growth. He not only helped John to prove himself, but also introduced him to most of the poets of the Renaissance, and also brought Keats into the circle of the most advanced people in England. Lee Hunt laid the groundwork for Keats' future poetry, opening up the world of romanticism for him.

Romanticism

As a phenomenon, romanticism appeared in European and American culture at the dawn of the industrial revolution. His main postulates were a return to nature, to sensuality, to the archaic. Romanticism was a reaction to the Enlightenment - the realm of rationalism, scientific knowledge of the world, the secularization of society. Romantics wanted to return religion to man as a taste for infinity, as an irrational component of understanding reality, as a lost path to happiness. Romanticism rebelled against the pragmatic materialism of the inhabitants and made it possible for myth, legend, epic, folklore to return to the minds of people.

In England, romanticism began with the poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge. They, having met the German romantics Friedrich Schelling and the Schlegel brothers, decided to put their theories into practice on their English soil. Unlike the Germans, the English romantics had an important placecomprehension of social processes and criticism of the emerging bourgeois society. W alter Scott, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, William Blake and John Keats were prominent representatives of English romanticism.

Despite their different political beliefs (Coleridge was a staunch conservative, and Shelley a bright revolutionary) and aesthetic views (the idealist Blake and the materialistic Scott), all romantics were united by a complete rejection of the emerging capitalist system, bourgeois mores and rational pragmatism. They were also similar in their positive attitude to human sensibility, to the renewal of the poetic structure, to the use of symbols and metaphors. Romantics saw their goal in returning the fairy tale to the disenchanted world.

Ancient Greece

The spirit of ancient Greece captivated Keats in his youth. The immortal lines of the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" of Homer, and the great tragedians Sophocles and Euripides helped this. But to a greater extent, this captivity by the spirit of Hellas was facilitated by the amazing intuition of John Keats. The poems of the ancient Greek poets, which he loved and appreciated, created in him that light, subtle feeling of belonging to the eternal archetypes, to the core universal human traditions. Keats' worldview was so saturated with images from ancient Greek epics and myths that he was able to enrich romanticism with this captivating atmosphere of the existence of gods and goddesses, beauty and harmony, joy and greatness.

Becoming Keats as a poet

Eternal lack of money made the life of a novice poetdifficult and anxious. His engagement to Fanny Bron, whom he sincerely loved, broke down due to the constant lack of money. Bad heredity, stress and anxiety began to undermine his he alth, which he did not follow at all, working for wear and tear. Poems John Keats wrote selflessly, completely immersed in the material and renouncing the world.

His first collection of poems, modestly titled Poems, came out in 1817 and was immediately attacked by critical journalists. Some poetic quotes by John Keats, especially of a political orientation, were constantly exaggerated and maliciously ridiculed by criticism. He was accused of lack of education, recalling his origins. People like Keats, people "from the bottom", who had the audacity to scold the established order and actions of the authorities, were not taken seriously in those days. They were considered vulgar half-educated who should have known their place.

Endymion

After the publication of the first collection, Keats is removed from London to the provinces. There, in seclusion, he concentrates and works on the poem Endymion. This great work was intended to prove to friends and admirers the strength of his talent. Although, first of all, he had to prove it to himself. He did an excellent job with the poem. It is "Endymion" that will reveal all the facets of the poet's work and, unfortunately, bring posthumous fame to John Keats.

In "Endymion" the poet combined two equally important goals of writing - a sober depiction of real human life with its hardships, hardships and cataclysms, and the artist's desire for freedomflight into the realm of art. Showing the dark sides of existence, Keats did not forget the bright aspirations for beauty. He proceeded from the tragic view, characteristic of all romantics, of the irreconcilable conflict between the ideal and the real. He tried to bring back the beauty that the zeitgeist had banished from a bourgeois, thoroughly rational society.

Quotes from the poems of John Keats

• "How often death has been sweet to me."
• "I want light from the word than just light".
• "And you are far away in humanity".
• "Beautiful captivates forever…"
• "Strong is the love and glory of the days of death, and beauty is strong. But death is stronger."

William Hazlitt

After working on Endymion, Keats has grown much stronger as a poet and citizen. His views became more daring and uncompromising. And then he began to notice naivety and softness in his senior comrade Li Hyun-te, and in his views he felt superficiality and conformity. Keats himself wanted a real fight. He distanced himself from Hent and acquired a new, more radical teacher and comrade. They became William Hazlitt, a student of Coleridge, a deep connoisseur of Shakespeare, a brilliant critic and a fine connoisseur of poetry. Hazlitt fearlessly and energetically criticized the bourgeoisie and fiercely hated all institutions of power, observing in them only instruments of oppression of the people.

From Hazlitt, Keats adopted an attitude to art as to some kind of higher power, which is the only protector of workers and is not subject to either the miserable rich or impudent usurpers. Love for Shakespeareas the highest embodiment of the infinite freedom of creativity and poetic courage also passed to Keats from his new teacher and colleague. Inspired by new ideas, Keats writes the poem "Isabella, or the Pot of Basil", in which he puts a farewell polemic with Lee Hunt.

Throughout 1819, John Keats worked on his odes, later called great. These are “Ode to Psyche”, “Ode to a Nightingale”, “Ode to Melancholy”, “Ode to Autumn”, “Ode to Idleness”. In them, the poet showed readers new facets of his genius. He skillfully wove an exquisite mystical thread into the Hellenic ornament of his fantasies. In the same year, he wrote the ballads "The Eve of St. Agnes", "Lamia" and worked on a new large-scale poem "Hyperion", which, alas, remained unfinished. The mood of his works becomes disturbing and restless, spiritualistic motifs appear. Keats probably had a premonition of his imminent tragic death.

Sickness and death

In the early 1820s, Keats began to bleed in the throat, and therefore the nature of the recent ailments became extremely clear. There was no doubt left. Tuberculosis has already killed Keats' mother and his younger brother Tom. It was the turn of the poet himself. John spent the last year of his life in creative silence, solitude and peace.

He died in Rome, February 23, 1821, at the age of 25. The poet was buried in the Roman Protestant cemetery.

The words are inscribed on his grave: "Here lies someone whose name is written in water."