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
Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings.
—John Keats
Topics: Philosophy, Angels
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
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charact’ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And feel that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love;- then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think,
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.
—John Keats
Topics: Death, Dying
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
Wide sea, that one continuous murmur breeds along the pebbled shore of memory!
—John Keats
I cannot exist without you. I am forgetful of everything but seeing you again. My life seems to stop there, I see no further. You have absorb’d me. I ave a sensation at the present moment as though I were dissolving. I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion… I have hudder’d at it… I shudder no more. I could be martyr’d for my religion: Love is my religion. I could die for that. I could die for you. My creed is love, and you are its only tenet. You have ravish’d me away by a power I cannot resist
—John Keats
Topics: Romance, Love
My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.
—John Keats
Topics: Imagination
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
Undescribed sounds, that come a-swooning over hollow grounds, and wither drearily on barren moors.
—John Keats
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.
—John Keats
Topics: Music
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: Failure, Failures, Success & Failure, Mistakes, Difficulties, Adversity
I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.
—John Keats
Topics: Depression
Let me have music dying, and I seek no more delight.
—John Keats
Topics: Music
There is not a fiercer hell than the failure in a great object.
—John Keats
Topics: Failure
What is more gentle than a wind in summer?
—John Keats
Topics: Nature
O for the gentleness of old Romance, the simple planning of a minstrel’s song!
—John Keats
Topics: Romance
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
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
It appears to me that almost any man may like the spider spin from his own inwards his own airy citadel.
—John Keats
Topics: Illusion
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
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
Away with old Romance! Away with novels, plots and plays of foreign courts; Away with love-verses, sugar’d in rhyme, the intrigues, amours of idlers; Fitted for only banquets of the night where dancers to late music slide; The unhealthy pleasures, ex
—John Keats
Topics: Romance
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
Axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses: We read fine things but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the Author.
—John Keats
Topics: Experience
I shall soon be laid in the quiet grave – thank God for the quiet grave
—John Keats
Topics: Death
There’s a blush for won t, and a blush for shan’t, and a blush for having done it: There’s a blush for thought and a blush for naught, and a blush for just begun it.
—John Keats
Topics: Shame
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: Human Nature, Humanity
Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity—it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
—John Keats
Topics: Art, Poets, Poetry
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: Thrift, Imagination
I would jump down Etna for any public good—but I hate a mawkish popularity.
—John Keats
Topics: Popularity
Knowledge enormous makes a God of me. Names, deeds, gray legends, dire events, rebellions, Majesties, sovran voices, agonies, Creations and destroyings, all at once Pour into the wide hollows of my brain, And deify me, as if some blithe wine Or bright elixir peerless I had drunk, And so become immortal.
—John Keats
Topics: Wine
Faded the flower and all its budded charms,
Faded the sight of beauty from my eyes,
Faded the shape of beauty from my arms,
Faded the voice, warmth, whiteness, paradise—
Vanish’d unseasonably at shut of eve.
—John Keats
Give me women, wine and snuff Until I cry out hold, enough You may do so san objection Till the day of resurrection; For bless my beard then aye shall be My beloved Trinity.
—John Keats
Topics: Wine
A proverb is not a proverb to you until life has illustrated it.
—John Keats
Topics: Proverbial Wisdom, Proverbs
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
What the imagination seizes as beauty must be the truth.
—John Keats
Topics: Truth
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: Tourism, Reading, Travel
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
—John Keats
Topics: Beauty
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
I always made an awkward bow.
—John Keats
Topics: Last Words
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