John Keats: vita, opere e commento

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Data:	02.02.2006
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John Keats

Life (1795-1821)

He was one of the greatest member of the group of the second generation of romantic poets. He was a poet of an artistic perfection using an extreme purity of form and language. Keats has indeed become an symbolic figure in English literature, the figure of the artist who regards his life in the service of poetry and poetry as a religion: he said. Keats was born in London in 1795. he became a medical student in London but by that time he announced his decision to devote his life to poetry and in 1817 with the help of Shelley he published his first volume of verses: “Poems by John Keats”. A second phase in Keats’ development as a poet is marked by the composition of “Endymion”; a long mythological poem in four books. The story, taken from Greek mythology, tells about the love between Endymion and the moon, in this poem we can see his love for Greek civilisation. In the last years of his life seriously ill with consumption (TB, a family illness: his mother and brother died of Tb) and tormented by his unhappy love for a young girl, Keats closed himself in the “monastery of his imagination” and wrote all his bast poetry. His third and last volume of poetry is to be placed among the most memorable achievements of English poetry in the nineteenth century. The volume contained tales in verse, the unfinished poem of “Hyperion” (a long narrative poem under Milton’s influence) and all his great odes: “Ode to a Nightingale”, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, “To Autumn”, “Ode to (on) Melancholy”, “To Psyche” etc… The tales in verse, especially “The eve of St. Agnes” have a purity and perfection of language but it is in the odes that Keats gave the greatest expression of his poetic genius. Here we can find the central theme, the drama of Keats and all Romantic generation that means a conflict between the real and the ideal, between the reality and dream and the human aspiration towards a paradise of beauty, freedom and happiness and the tragic human condition to live in a world where we can find the power of sorrow, and death which characterised man’s existence.
With the odes is also to be remembered the ballad of “La Belle Dame sans merci” a poem an the old theme of the femme fatale.
In 1820, the symptoms of consumption (tuberculosis) became evident. So he travelled to Italy in an attempt to recover his health but he died in Rome in 1821 and he was buried in the Protestant Cemetery of Rome. Keats lived o short but intense life in fact he died at the age of twenty-five years old. The intuition that he was to die early is, perhaps, responsible for his great activity as poet.

The substance of his poetry

In his lyrical poems there are some personal experiences but they are “behind” the odes, not their substance as for Wordsworth or Shelley or Byron. The poetical personal pronoun “I” does not stand for a human being linked to the events of his time, but for universal one. The common Romantic tendency to identify landscapes with subjective moods and emotions is rarely present in his poetry; it has no sense of mystery.

The role of imagination

Keats believed in the supreme power of imagination, for this reason he was considered a Romantic poet. The imagination, for Keats, takes two main forms. The first one is that the world of his poetry is artificial, it’s what he imagines rather than he reflects from direct experience. The second one Keats’ poetry represents a vision of what he would like human life to be like, stimulated by his own experience of pain and misery.
Beauty: the central theme of his poetry

The contemplation of beauty is the central theme of Keats’ poetry. But it is his disinterested love for it that created a difference from the other Romantic writers and makes him the forerunner of writers like Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetes who saw in the cult of beauty the expression of the principle “art for art’s sake”, but, in Keats’ view it’s still a Romantic feature because of its moral aim. It is the classical Greek world that inspires Keats. To him the expression of beauty is the ideal of all art as the Greek beliefs. Keats identifies beauty and truth as the only type of knowledge; he says in the “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: .

Physical beauty and spiritual beauty

His first approach of beauty comes from the senses, from the concrete physical sensations. For Wordsworth only sight and hearing but for Keats all the senses are very important. This “physical beauty” is in all the forms of nature, in its colours, in its perfumes, in a woman, so beauty seen in all its details which produces much more joy. Keats says in the opening line of Endymion: , so this opinion introduces a sort of “spiritual beauty”, that is the one of love, friendship and poetry. These two kind of beauty are linked together: the first one is linked to life and death, the second one is related to eternity.