John Keats (1795–1821) is regarded as one of the greatest English poets. On account of his premature death, he has become the archetype of the young and talented but doomed poet.
Born in the City of London, Keats began training at age 16 to become an apothecary and surgeon but abandoned medicine to pursue poetry. His creative development and literary achievement transpired in an extraordinarily short span. He wrote all of his most famous poems, including “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to Melancholy,” and “To Autumn” in one year, 1818–19, and published them in 1820. His poetry is acclaimed as the culmination of the ideas that marked the English Romantic Movement.
At age 25, Keats was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He traveled to the warmer weather in Italy, hoping to improve his health, but died in Rome. His tomb in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome carries the epitaph that he wrote: “This grave contains all that was mortal of a young English poet, who, on his death bed, in the bitterness of his heart at the malicious power of his enemies, desired these words to be graven on his tombstone, ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water.'”
Keats’s letters, published in 1848 and 1878, offer insight into his poetic intentions, and are regarded with nearly the veneration given to his poetry; T. S. Eliot called them “the most important ever written by any English poet.”
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by John Keats
Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterward carefully avoid.
—John Keats
Topics: Failures, Failure, Adversity, Difficulties, Mistakes, Success & Failure
Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.
—John Keats
Topics: Poetry, Poets
The only means of strengthening one’s intellect is to make up one’s mind about nothing—to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts. Not a select party.
—John Keats
Topics: Opinion
It appears to me that almost any man may like the spider spin from his own inwards his own airy citadel.
—John Keats
The roaring of the wind is my wife and the stars through the window pane are my children. The mighty abstract idea I have of beauty in all things stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness.
—John Keats
Topics: Family
Land and sea, weakness and decline are great separators, but death is the great divorcer for ever.
—John Keats
Topics: Death, Dying
What is more gentle than a wind in summer?
—John Keats
Topics: Nature
Though a quarrel in the streets is a thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine; the commonest man shows a grace in his quarrel.
—John Keats
Topics: Fighting
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