JOHN KEATS

Here he breathed an atmosphere saturated with literature, stimulated by the reverend's son, Charles Cowden Clarke, a well-educated young man with a contagious enthusiasm for poetry who remained bound to Keats by a firm friendship, even after the course was over.

He spent the first years of life mainly on the estate administered by his father, until his parents in the summer of 1803 sent him to the private school of the Reverend John Clarke, where he gave evidence of an indolent and pugnacious character, while doing various readings.

John Keats was born in London on October 31, 1795. He was a British poet, considered one of the most significant writers of romanticism. Born into a family of modest extraction, his literary passion developed at the age of fifteen, inspired by Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser.

He worked on poetry until his death, he died in Rome in 1821, at the age of only twenty-five. Peculiarity of Keats' poetics is the lively response to the beauty of poetry and art; among his main works we can mention Hyperion, The Eve of St. Agnes, La Belle dame sans merci and the very numerous odes, all composed in a very short period of a few years in which Keats devoted himself entirely to poetry. married 9 October 1794 Frances, daughter of Jennings.

London, 1795

Life

JOHNKEATS

The tranquility of these years, however, began to crack. Keats was beset by a series of serious misfortunes. On April 16, 1804, when Keats was not yet nine years old, his father died of a head injury following a fall from a horse and, in March 1810, he also lost his mother to tuberculosis. The young Keats brothers were thus entrusted to their maternal grandmother, who, however, unable to take care of them, had two guardians appointed: Richard Abbey and John Sandell. In the autumn of 1810 John left Reverend Clarke's school to study and apprentice with Thomas Hammond, apothecary and surgeon and neighbor and physician to the Jennings family.

Due to some disagreements with the surgeon, Keats finished his apprenticeship before the deadline and in October 1815 registered as a medical student at Guy's Hospital; in 1816, having passed the licensing exams at the Apothecaries's Hall, he was appointed assistant of Guy's Hospital. But if this environment served him as an excellent training for the profession of medicine, Keats was able to notice how he did not carry out this profession with love; therefore he soon gave himself, passionate self-taught, to the congenial poetic studies. This ardent literary vocation was stimulated by his friend Cowden Clarke, from whom he drew his love for Edmund Spenser's verses; it is no coincidence that the first poem that is canonically recognized as Keats is precisely Imitation of Spenser, probably written in 1813.

He made friends with Leigh Hunt who, in addition to being a man of wide culture and versed in good poetry, was also a proud continuer of the Spenser tradition; towards Hunt, who recognizing his nascent genius published his poem O Solitude in his journal The Examiner, Keats in fact showed the affection and reverence of an ancient disciple. Literary studies, if initially they were parallel to medical activity, completely absorbed Keats since, in December 1816, he decided to leave Guy's Hospital to devote himself completely to poetry, a passion that will devour him until his premature death. As early as 1817 he published a small volume of verses, where the influence exercised by Hunt remained predominant, who was confirmed to be his main poetic reference model from the beginning.

Beginning of Literary Production

Meanwhile, Keats attracted many friends with the irresistible charm of his personality, and with his brilliant sense of friendship: in addition to the painter Joseph Severn, whom he had already known previously, in the period dominated by Hunt he made friends with John Hamilton Reynolds, Benjamin Bailey, Charles Armitage Brown and the painter Benjamin Haydon. In these years he also began his intimacy with Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charles Lamb, Horace Smith and William Hazlitt, whose "depth of taste" he greatly admired, which he cited as one of those "marvelous things in our time". In a short time Keats also learned how, to give a decisive boost to his poetic vocation, he had to enjoy the close company of such men, combining it with the serious and methodical study of William Shakespeare and William Wordsworth, developing at the same time the most authentic and vital part of himself.

Beginning of Literary Production

Poetry is not meant to convey a message to readers, but to ignite the imagination with beauty. Beauty was a source of joy to Keats, something that triggers sensations and involves all the senses. Beauty for Keats is both physical and spiritual: while physical beauty upsets the senses and arouses joy, spiritual beauty comes precisely from the upheaval of the depths of the soul and leads to immortal artistic forms. Physical and spiritual beauty go hand in hand, but the first is subject to time, the second is eternal. Keats formulated a theory he called negative capability, which is the poet’s ability to nullify his identity when he observes an object as an inspiration to him in order to identify with it.

John Keats was the greatest exponent of English literary romanticism, in fact, his works belong to the second generation of romantic works. Unlike the poets of his generation, Keats was never drawn to the social and political themes of his time, for example Wordsworth or shelley but remained attached to the ideals of nature, art and beauty that came from classical poetry. In addition, his poetry was greatly influenced by the dramatic events of his life; the poet perceived death as a dark shadow on his life and the only possible consolation was art and poetry, in fact he claimed to "not exist without poetry"which he regarded as something absolute, living eternally even after death. According to the poet, poetry is born from the depths of the soul, it surpasses life and becomes immortal.

Literary Style

In this way he is able to search for sensations and through imagination, which he considers more powerful than reason, he can see the beauty of things and create poetry. This is what he did to make his poem. This poem represents in fact the fundamental theme of his poetics, that is the relationship between life, death and art: Keats reflects on the immortality of art as opposed to the fugacity of life. He addresses a Greek urn as if it were a person and describes the various scenes portrayed on the vase. Try to imagine the story and meaning of each scene you observe.

Literary Style

La belle dame sans merci (the beautiful lady without mercy) is one of the most important works that Keats has done. The poem starts with a question to the knight who the speaker founds: the knight is in bad conditions. At this point the point of view shifts from the first speaker to the questioned knight, who tells us his story, about how he met this beautiful lady in the meadows and explains us how beautiful she looked. The knights tells us how he started giving her gifts and how appreciative she was of them and also how he was looking all the time at her, mesmerized, thinking that she was also loving his company. The poem goes on with the knight explaining how she also gave him different gifts and how she told him that she loved him, in a weird language. She takes him to a place and makes him sleep with a song, but he dreams about men crying about how she enslaved them. He then eventually woke up and found himself in the same position that all of those men were into: mesmerized and then enslaved by the beautiful lady without mercy.

La Belle Dame Sans Merci: Summary

There are three characters in the poem: - The first speaker, whose identity is unknown and who finds the knight and talks in the first three stanzas. - The knight, which is the second speaker: he's the one that answers the first speaker and talks from the 4th to the 12th stanza, explaining how he got in that situation after he met the lady. - The Lady, who is presented only indirectly, after the knight mentions her and describes her. - The kings, princes and knights in the dream of the knight, who are the ones that tried to warn him about the lady, because they have ended up in the same way that he did.

La Belle Dame Sans Merci: Characters

The lady: represents death, and her ability to fascinate describes the relationship between love and death which is a typically romantic theme: the two things are often linked, because love always has a destructive or in any case dangerous and painful part.The knight: he wears some symbols of death: the lily and the withered rose. Paleness: All of the men who fall beneath the woman's spell are pale and weary, suggesting illness or a loss of vitality. The lily a white flower upon the knight's brow, indicates his purity, virtue, and his honor. The paleness of the men in the knight's could also express fear because it reflects the horror of being trapped upon the hillside by the woman's charms, stuck somewhere being a nightmare and reality. Lily: In a biblical tradition, the lily is commonly associated with the ideas of purity and innocence. By alluding to the purity of the lily, the speaker lets us know that the knight appears to retain his honor in spite of his poor state. And that lilies are often used at funerals, the lily may allude to the death-like state in which the knight wanders.

Symbols

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, Alone and palely loitering? The sedge is wither’d from the lake, And no birds sing.

Rhetorical devises: - alliteration - assonance - consonance - enjambment - anaphora - refrain - polysindeton

It’s a lyrical ballad formed by 12 quartains. The poem is written in iambic tetrameter for the first three lines per each stanza, and in iambic dimeter for the last line in each stanza. The effect of this scheme is that it flows like a song, smoothly and with rhythm. This particular ballad has a meter and rhyme scheme that produces a flow that engages the reader. The rhyme scheme is ABCB.

Figures of Speech

And there she lullèd me asleep, And there I dream’d — Ah! woe betide! The latest dream I ever dream’d On the cold hill’s side.

She took me to her elfin grot , And there she wept and sigh’d fill sore; And there I shut her wild, wild eyes With kisses four.

She found me roots of relish sweet And honey wild and manna dew, And sure in language strange she said, “I love thee true

I set her on my pacing steed And nothing else saw all day long, For sideways would she lean, and sing A faery’s song

I made a garland for her head,And bracelets too, and fragrant zone; She look’d at me as she did love, And made sweet moan.

I met a lady in the meads, Full beautiful — a faery’s child, Her hair was long, her foot was light, And her eyes were wild.

I see a lily on thy brow thyWith anguish moist and fever dew; And on thy cheeks a fading rose Fast withereth too.’

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,So haggard and so woe-begone?The squirrel’s granary is full, And the harvest ‘s done.

And this is why I sojourn here Alone and palely loitering, Though the sedge is wither’d from the lake, And no birds sing.’

I saw their starved lips in the gloam With horrid warning gapèd wide, And I awoke and found me here, On the cold hill’s side.

I saw pale kings and princes too, Pale warriors, death-pale were they all; They cried – “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” Hath thee in thrall!”

La Belle Dame Sans Merci is the brillance of romantic poetry. In it the medieval revival which constitutes one of the most significant aspects of romanticism reaches its culmination. Keats was in love with the Middle Ages. In La Belle Dame Sans Merci Keats not only reproduces the medieval gallant, but also creates the typical medieval atmosphere of enchantment. The picture of the knight-at-arms with which the poem opens at once transports us into the medieval days of knight-errantry. The beautiful fairy lady who fascinate the knight and eventually guides him to his spiritual disaster recalls the medieval vampire woman who sucked men’s blood with cold. The reference to elfin grot, “honey wild and manna dew”, dream-vision of the skeletons of kings, princes and warriors diffuse over the whole poem the mood of wonder that is associated with the medieval mind. Again in the treatment of medievalism Keats, like Coleridge relies more on suggestion than on description. Nothing is said definitely and in detail.

Medieval Influences

Everything is left to the imagination of the reader. Nothing is said about the nature of the “fairy’s child” or about the fate that waits the knight. La Belle Dame Sans Merci is an example of the ballad. The story of a mortal creature being seduced by an enchantress and carried to an elfin world is a fairly recurrent theme in ballad literature. The poem has all the simplicity and directness, the weird beauty and imaginative intensity of the best ballads. Though the poem is a ballad, it is intensely lyrical like a romantic poem. It is in a sense a cry from the poet’s heart, a tale of disillusionment told by a man whose dream of love has faded, leaving behind a taste of dust and ashes in the mouth. Consumed as he was by an intense passion of love, the knight at arms seems to be a reflex of Keats’s own self. But the subjective note seems to be impersonal because of the narrative and dramatic form of the poem.

Medieval Influences