John Keats lived only twenty-five years and four months (1795-1821),

yet his poetic achievement is extraordinary. Most of his major poems were
written between his twenty-third and twenty-fourth years, and all his poems
were written by his twenty-fifth year. His genius was not generally
perceived during his lifetime or immediately after his death. Keats, dying,
expected his poetry to be forgotten, as the epitaph he wrote for his
tombstone indicates: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." But
nineteenth century critics and readers did come to appreciate him, though,
for the most part, they had only a partial understanding of his work. Leigh
Hunt ,the poet and editor of the radical journal The Examiner ,and his
volume was caught in cross fire between the Hunt circle and Tory wits of
Blackwood’s Edinburgh magazine and the Quarterly Review.
With the twentieth century, the perception of Keats's poetry
expanded; he was and is praised for his seriousness and thoughtfulness, for
his dealing with difficult human conflicts and artistic issues, and for his
impassioned mental pursuit of truth. Keats advocated living "the ripest,
fullest experience that one is capable of"; he believed that what determines
truth is experience. For Mathew Arnold, writing in 1853,Keats was” one
whose exquisite genius and pathetic death render him for everlasting.”
Keats belonged to a literary movement called romanticism. The poet,
unhappy with the real world, escapes or attempts to escape into the ideal.
Disappointed in his mental flight, he returns to the real world. Usually he
returns because human beings cannot live in the ideal or because he has not
found what he was seeking. But the experience changes his understanding of
his situation, of the world.
Douglas Bush noted that "Keats's important poems are related to, or grow
directly out of...inner conflicts." Keats often associated love and pain both
in his life and in his poetry. Three central and independent themes resound
through Keats’s poetry: the relation between the ideal world of art and the
human world of suffering, the nature of poetry itself and throughout, an
attention to pre Christian mythology .And this poet who was so preoccupied
with myth was himself subject to mythology.
For Harold Bloom :Keats was engaged in a literary form of Oedipal
strife with his great predecessors such as Shakespeare ,Milton and
Wordsworth and struggled with the power of the great English poets ,who,
Bloom ,argued ,threatened to overwhelm his own poetic voice rather than, as
more orthodox critics of influence have had it, informing it.
 Keats's imagery ranges among all our physical sensations: sight, hearing,
taste, touch, smell, temperature, weight, pressure, hunger, thirst, sexuality,
and movement. Keats repeatedly combines different senses in one image,
that is, he attributes the trait(s) of one sense to another, a practice called
synaesthesia . His synaesthetic imagery performs two major functions in his
poems: it is part of their sensual effect, and the combining of senses
normally experienced as separate suggests an underlying unity of dissimilar
happenings, the oneness of all forms of life. Richard H. Fogle calls these
images the product of his "unrivaled ability to absorb, sympathize with, and
humanize natural objects.
Although Keats loved poetic narrative, especially its two extremes—the
spare ballad and the digressive tale—he was perhaps intrinsically more a meditative
poet than a narrative one, and the sonnet is irresistible as a flexible container for
meditation. Keats knew the effort made by Milton and Wordsworth to modernize
the sonnet and expand its formal and thematic range, and his ambition led him to
continue the effort of those daunting poets. By the end of his life, he had
succeeded in adding notably to the renewal of the sonnet, questioning its inherited
neo-Platonic axioms, rearranging its rhymes, and humanizing its diction.

Keats writes the sonnet in which all his early practice culminates: In the sonnets,
Keats conveys the range of his interests , his concerns, his attachments, his
obsessions. Some are light and improvisatory, tossed off in fifteen minutes, a
moment’s thought. Some are polemics, or romantic period pieces; others are
brooding testaments or compulsive outpourings, which seem to expand on the page.
These sonnets are replete with a sensuous feeling for nature— “ The poetry of
earth is never dead”—that looks back to Wordsworth and forward to Frost. They
also luxuriate in the spaces of imagination and trigger the daydreaming capacities
of the mind .Keats came of age in the midst of a full-scale revival of the sonnet
form, which had fallen into disfavor and mis-use in the latter half of the
seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth centuries.

Keats loved the intoxication of creating in a fine frenzy. He believed, as he told

his brothers, that “the excellence of every Art is its intensity” ,and the sonnet
offered him a form of powerful compactness. He was highly responsive to others—
he had a gift for friendship—and his sonnets are filled with addresses and
dedications, acknowledgments, literary debts repaid.
Friendship was one of his triggering subjects. Love was another.

Keats wrote his sonnets in a wide variety of moods: with affection, with disgust,
with outrage, with embarrassment, with passionate longing. They have a mortal
stamp and increasingly take on a tragic grandeur. He conceived his early sonnets
under the spell of Spenserian romance, his later ones under the sign of
Shakespearean tragedy .For Keats, the displacement of the poet’s protean self into
another existence was the key feature of the highest
poetic imagination. He believed that this heightened receptivity was part of the
native genius of English poetry.

Between 1814 and 1819, John Keats wrote sixty-four sonnets. He was
eighteen years old when he composed his first sonnet; he was turning twenty-four
when he completed his last one. He restlessly experimented with the fourteen-line
form and used it to plunge into (and explore) his emotional depths. Keats enters
the anthologies with a sonnet—On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer—
which has become the most famous of his early poems

Keats was so moved by the power and aliveness of Chapman's translation of

Homer. The poem expresses the intensity of Keats's experience; it also
reveals how passionately he cared about poetry. To communicate how
profoundly the revelation of Homer's genius affected him, Keats uses
imagery of exploration and discovery. In a sense, the reading experience
itself becomes a Homeric voyage, both for the poet and the reader.
His first known sonnet is a hybrid of Shakespearean and Petrarchan units; and
within his prevalent Petrarchan mode, where the octave-form is inflexible, he
assiduously varies, from sonnet to sonnet, the arrangement of syntax and rhyme in
the sestet—a form of work invisible to the casual eye, but indispensable to the
apprentice poet. These experiments are carried out in the service of feeling, as
Keats searches for means to express a sequence of emotions, emotions that have
been strong enough to compel him from silence into composition .It matters to
Keats not only what a sonnet says but the way it sounds as spoken utterance.
Violating his own free-thinking convictions by making reference to Christian
symbols was not, however, the way to reach an audience. He needed to find
experiences authentic to himself but neither eccentric or private, and to evoke
them in images to which others could respond.
Keats accomplishes such a potential sharing of common feeling when ,departing
from simple replication of literary content (lovely Laura and faithful Petrarch), he
describes the effect of reading, Homer—not merely by mentioning deep-brow’d
Homer (in the manner of fair-hair’d Milton) but by finding three figures
recognizable to an ordinary audience: the seasoned traveler sailing “round many
western islands,” the astronomer (“some watcher of the skies”), and the explorer
(“stout Cortez”). These figures bring the felt exaltation of literary discovery home
to any reader. Keats, not possessing Greek, knows what it is to be ignorant: he
himself, before reading Chapman, hadn’t been able to sense the poetry of Homer.
The exalted passage from ignorance to knowledge climaxing in the sestet’s “wild
surmise” of further exploration is assumed to be one that any reader will have
analogously undergone.
Keats was always deeply impressed by imaginative things. He loved to be carried
away and overwhelmed, to wander in fictive spaces, secondary worlds. He was a
voracious reader with an insatiable appetite for poetry, for Latin authors and
mythological keys to classical culture Keats experienced poetry on his pulse. The
poems of key predecessors often stimulated his inner life and incited his response.
This was certainly the case with his breakthrough sonnet “On first looking into
Chapman’s Homer,” which he wrote at a fever pitch in a couple of enthralling early
morning hours in October 1816. This was an emblematic or allegorical moment in
Keats’s writing life—in the life of any young poet—because his reading vitally seized
him and spurred him into his own extravagant making. It fostered his imagination
and gave him to himself.
Keats’s sonnet enacts a feeling of rapturous discovery; it breathes its own
wonderment. It creates the sensation of tremendous vastness within the
prescribed space of the Petrarchan form. The twenty-year old poet builds his case
so convincingly that readers ever after have been powerfully affected by the
swelling turn in the sonnet, the reverberations of the final sestet. Only when he
heard Chapman’s bold rendition of “deep-brow’d Homer,” the speaker reveals:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
The threat of failure could overwhelm Keats, as in his dirge-like sonnet “When I
have fears that I may cease to be,” but he ultimately responded by rededicating
himself to the creative task with a deeper candor, a more furious resolve.These
fourteen-line poems deliver us to ourselves more fully and more wholly, through the
sensuous, rhythmic, musical language of attainment. Keats discovered that the
sonnet is a small vessel capable of plunging tremendous depths. It is one of the
enabling forms of human inwardness. We are befriended by these passionate,
wayward, adventurous poems. Indeed, we are befriended by art itself, Keats
teaches us, in our struggle with ourselves, in our urgent soul-making. We are made
more human and noble by reading him, for he is a hero of our jubilant, flawed, tragic
humanity. This poem falls into two major thought groups: Keats expresses his
fear of dying young in the first thought unit, lines 1-12. He fears that he will
not fulfill himself as a writer (lines 1-8) and that he will lose his beloved
(lines 9-12). Keats resolves his fears by asserting the unimportance of love
and fame in the concluding two and a half lines of this sonnet.
 The poet's concern with time (not enough time to fulfill his poetic gift
and love) is supported by the repetition of "when" at the beginning of each
quatrain and by the shortening of the third quatrain. Keats attributes two
qualities to love: (1) it has the ability to transform the world for the lovers
("faery power"), but of course fairies are not real, and their enchantments
are an illusion and (2) love involves us with emotion rather than thought ("I
feel" and "unreflecting love").
Reflecting upon his feelings, which the act of writing this sonnet has
involved, Keats achieves some distancing from his own feelings and ordinary
life; this distancing enables him to reach a resolution. He thinks about the
human solitariness ("I stand alone") and human insignificance (the implicit
contrast betwen his lone self and "the wide world"). The shore is a point of
contact, the threshold between two worlds or conditions, land and sea; so
Keats is crossing a threshold, from his desire for fame and love to accepting
their unimportance and ceasing to fear and yearn.