JOHN KEATS

life: john keats is considered with percy shelley one of the most important poets in
the second generation of English romanticism , he was also interested to greek
civilization and to middle age. He was born in London in 1795 but his family was very
trouble , in fact his father died in a riding incident and his mother died for turberculosis
. he decided to study to became a surgeon but because of bad finances he gave up
medicine for poetry and he became friends of some important writers of that period
like percy shelley . soon he understood to have tuberculosis so he decided to go in
Italy to find a cure but he died in 1821.
Keats great year: his great year was in 1818 because he wrote a lot of important
works, some of these were characterized by romantic feauters , like the eve of st
agnes, but most of them were odes where he admires the beauty of art, like ode to a
Grecian urn .
The substance of his poetry : despite his troubled life greatly influenced his poetry,
his personal experiences were not the substance of his poetry, but they were behind
his works. when He used the personal pronoun in his works, he didnt want to
represent the human being but the entire spirit of universe . his romantic view is
always described with his sentence scenery is fine, but human nature is finer, but
his personal feelings are rarely in his poetry. He didnt believe in a pantheistic vision of
nature .
The role of imagination: keats believed that imagination made him a romantic poet.
Imagination is divided in two forms: the first was the way to create artificially the
world of poetry, the second is the way to create a vision of correct lifestyle to follow,
simulated by his own experience of pain and misery
Beauty and art: the central theme of keats works was the beauty , divided in
physical beauty ,perceived in nature by all the sense, and spiritual beauty that
give joy through love, friendship and poetry . these two kinds of beauty are linked to
life, enjoyment, decay and death . for keats beauty and truth were the only two types
of knowledge .
Negative capability : for keats the poet has the negative capability , the capability
to deny his certainties and personality to identify himself in the object which is the
source of his inspiration and the place where the truth resides , so for keats the poets
task was to seek sensations through poetry and render them beauty and truth , the
basis of knowledge