Keatss chief strengths and preoccupations Essays

Keatss chief strengths and preoccupations Essays Keatss chief strengths and preoccupations Essay Keatss chief strengths and preoccupations Essay From your reading so far what seems to be Keatss chief strengths and preoccupations? At the time when John Keats was born it was said that, poets are born, not made. Poets at the time were either gentlemen from the upper class, or well educated with intellectual backgrounds. Keatss background, at the time, was definitely of the lower classes; he did not have any social advantages that many of his contemporary poets took for granted. As well as this, there was nothing, in his early life that was suggestive of his poetic talent. He had to be a self-made poet. Keats grew up in a time of upheaval in every way, a time of new political thinking, of social and humanitarian reform, a revolutionary time that had earlier spawned the French Revolution which in turned had strengthened the will to change everywhere in the early nineteenth century. These times brought with them the Romantic Movement. Romanticism was a rebellion. It was a reaction against the stiff views of poetry in the previous century, where technique was prized higher than inspiration and common sense higher than passion. The popular poetry of the period was over decorated and given to telling uninspired entertaining little tales. The poetic accent wasnt Romantic, it was romanticized. Keats wanted to be distinguished from the Romanticism crowd. Romantic poets could not escape being affected by the tendencies of their time and Keats certainly had his love for women, especially Fanny Brawne. However, in romanticized poetry the English countryside was a pastoral idyll. It was a place of great oaks looming above soft turf, warm sunlight or soft moonlight, brooks and great flower banks. While in reality it was a place of thigh deep mud, filthy animals, oppressed illiterate workers living no better than their animals and doing gruesome work in all weathers. However, a good deal of the fashionable romanticized poetry found its way into Keatss poetry too, especially in his early poems, with his lack of coherence and rhyming lead to him being overlooked by critics; his early attempts at writing long poems had failed. Much of this romanticism came about because of Keatss exposure to the work of a minor poet named Leigh Hunt. Keats picked up more of the Huntian style than his immature poetry could carry. On the other hand, Keats was an ardent admirer of William Shakespeare. Like Keats Shakespeare was an ordinary man whose poetic gift was at odds with his station in life and after an initial bout of uncertainty over his own talents, Keats quickly found his strength and he knew it; Keats knew that critical opinion was necessary for any success. Shakespeare inspired him to write his most famous poem in 1816, On First Looking Into Chapmans Homer. Although the title refers to a specific literary work, Chapmans Homer, the subject of the poem is the experience of discovery and vision; emphasising imagination as a getaway to freedom reference to Romanticism. The picture of Cortez standing on the mountaintop gazing out to sea and, specifically, the focus on visual imagery eagle eyes, stard at, lookd at, convey an almost light-headed sensation of prospect and vision. Upon reading Chapmans Homer, Keats experienced such a feeling of exhilaration and expansiveness. Keats exploits the sonnet form to reinforce the rhetorical progression of the metaphors. After eight lines that establish the general analogy between reading poetry and exploring the world, Keats focuses on the specific discovery at the heart of the poem. The colon at the end of line eight contributes to this emphasis by suggesting that the whole poem has been preparing for the image presented in the final six lines of the sonnet. (Interestingly, Keats uses this approach in many of his poems, sub-dividing them into 4,4,6.) As the focus and tempo intensify in the last few lines, metaphor is replaced by simile. In the final section, the speaker tries to convey what his experience felt like. This step into a more explicit acknowledgment of the metaphoric process corresponds with the sense that the experience was so amazing that it may elude the powers of language; after all, Cortez and his men are almost dumbfounded at the spectacle. Throughout many of his poems, Keats places an emphasis on Greek mythology and nature, a fascination that is exploited many times over. In To Autumn, for example, Keats treats autumn as a kind of god or goddess whose presence can be felt in many occurrences of late and early fall. The weather, crops, plants and animals, whilst relating directly to nature, are more subtly turned into images of the gods presence. Keats did not believe in gods and goddesses. He did, however, take a great interest in the poetry of ancient Greece and To Autumn is the sixth in his sequence of odes, poems that ancient Greeks wrote to various gods. The poem is essentially an ode to autumn and the change of seasons. Keats was inspired by observing nature; his detailed description of natural occurrences has a pleasant appeal to the readers senses Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness The beauty of autumn is emphasized through phrases like; `ripeness to the core`, `swell the gord`, ` overbrimmed their clammy cells. . Keats use of the adjective `plump` as a verb excels this `ripeness` and together intensifies the beauty, which is emphasized through the repetition of `more` and `still more`. Keats almost forces his subject at us. Towards the end of his poetic career Keats was suffering, at that time, from tuberculosis. His poems were marked with sadness partly because he was too poor to marry Fanny Brawne. Keats broke off his engagement and began what he called a posthumous existence. When I have fears that I may cease to be is an expression of Keatss melancholy. When he wrote this poem, he was still quite sick and it was obvious that his ill health was not improving. Consequently, he developed a negative outlook on life. He expressed himself with the following poem, one I consider to be among his finest. In conclusion, few poets ascend to the level of John Keats, and even fewer ascend to that level at such an early age. John Keats was only 26 years old when he died however; he was considered, along with Wordsworth, to be the Romantic poet of the 19th century. He was the archetype of the Romantic writer. While still in good health, Keats was ambitious of doing the world some good, instead of focusing on his own sensitive soul. Keats felt that the deepest meaning of life lay in the apprehension of material beauty, although his mature poems reveal his fascination with a world of death and decay.