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
Wide sea, that one continuous murmur breeds along the pebbled shore of memory!
—John Keats
Who would wish to be among the commonplace crowd of the little famous—who are each individually lost in a throng made up of themselves?
—John Keats
Topics: Fame
My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.
—John Keats
Topics: Imagination
My passions are all asleep from my having slumbered till nearly eleven and weakened the animal fiber all over me to a delightful sensation about three degrees on this sight of faintness—if I had teeth of pearl and the breath of lilies I should call it languor—but as I am I must call it laziness. In this state of effeminacy the fibers of the brain are relaxed in common with the rest of the body, and to such a happy degree that pleasure has no show of enticement and pain no unbearable frown. Neither poetry, nor ambition, nor love have any alertness of countenance as they pass by me.
—John Keats
Topics: Laziness
Are there not thousands in the world who love their fellows even to the death, who feel the giant agony of the world, and more, like slaves to poor humanity, labor for mortal good?
—John Keats
Topics: Charity
I would jump down Etna for any public good—but I hate a mawkish popularity.
—John Keats
Topics: Popularity
Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
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.
—John Keats
Topics: Travel, Tourism, Reading
To one who has been long in city pent,
‘Tis very sweet to look into the fair
And open face of heaven, – to breathe a prayer
Full in the smile of the blue firmament.
—John Keats
There is nothing stable in the world; uproar’s your only music.
—John Keats
Topics: Security
I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.
—John Keats
Topics: Depression
The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted: thence proceeds mawkishness.
—John Keats
Topics: Imagination, Thrift
Though the most beautiful creature were waiting for me at the end of a journey or a walk; though the carpet were of silk, the curtains of the morning clouds; the chairs and sofa stuffed with cygnet’s down; the food manna, the wine beyond claret, the window opening on Winander Mere, I should not feel—or rather my happiness would not be so fine, as my solitude is sublime.
—John Keats
Topics: Solitude
O fret not after knowledge—I have none, and yet my song comes native with the warmth. O fret not after knowledge—I have none, and yet the Evening listens.
—John Keats
Topics: Birds
Land and sea, weakness and decline are great separators, but death is the great divorcer for ever.
—John Keats
Topics: Death, Dying
There is not a fiercer hell than the failure in a great object.
—John Keats
Topics: Failure
I was never afraid of failure, for I would sooner fail than not be among the best.
—John Keats
Topics: Fail, Failure, Great
What wreath for Lamia? What for Lycius?
What for the sage, old Apollonius?
Upon her aching forehead be there hung
The leaves of willow and of adder’s tongue;
And for the youth, quick, let us strip for him
The thyrsus, that his watching eyes may swim
Into forgetfulness; and, for the sage,
Let spear-grass and the spiteful thistle wage
War on his temples. Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine –
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade.
—John Keats
Topics: Science, Philosophy, Philosophers
What the imagination seizes as beauty must be the truth.
—John Keats
Topics: Truth
Souls of Poets dead and gone, What Elysium have ye known, Happy field or mossy cavern, Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern? Have ye tippled drink more fine Than mine hosts Canary wine?
—John Keats
Topics: Wine
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.
—John Keats
Topics: Music
The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate.
—John Keats
Topics: Excellence
Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced—even a proverb is no proverb to you till your life has illustrated it.
—John Keats
Topics: Experience
Even if I was well – I must make myself as good a Philosopher as possible. Now I have had opportunities of passing nights anxious and awake I have found other thoughts intrude upon me. If I should die, said I to myself, I have left no immortal work behind me – nothing to make my friends proud of my memory – but I have lov’d the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember’d.
—John Keats
Topics: Legacy
The Public is a thing I cannot help looking upon as an enemy, and which I cannot address without feelings of hostility.
—John Keats
Topics: Public
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all
Ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know.
—John Keats
Topics: Beauty
I equally dislike the favor of the public with the love of a woman—they are both a cloying treacle to the wings of independence.
—John Keats
Topics: Independence
I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections, and the truth of imagination.
—John Keats
Topics: Certainty
Love is my religion – I could die for it.
—John Keats
Topics: Love
There is an electric fire in human nature tending to purify—so that among these human creatures there is continually some birth of new heroism. The pity is that we must wonder at it, as we should at finding a pearl in rubbish.
—John Keats
Topics: Humanity, Human 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, Fight, Quarrels
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