Many famous writers have careers spanning over decades, though one English Romantic poet was able to achieve fame in his short career of only five years. John Keats was a poet with a remarkable ability to perceive the world around him; an ability that resonated throughout his works. Although John Keats lived an unfortunately short life, he is considered one of the most important figures of the English Romantic movement because of his use of Romantic literary devices and themes of love and loss in poems such as "La Belle Dame sans Merci" and "When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be."
On the outskirts of London on Halloween in 1795, famous Romantic poet John Keats was born. Entering school at the age of 8, Keats was "known for his fierce prowess in schoolyard fights" (“John Keats: Childhood”). Although Keats was the eldest of the four children and the son of a mere stable keeper, he and his large family lived a relatively comfortable life. He lived an uneventful life until his father, Thomas Keats, died from a skull fracture after being thrown from his horse. Following his father's death, Keats' distraught mother placed her children in the care of her elderly mother before abandoning him and his siblings for over three years (“John Keats: Childhood”). Only ten years old at the time, the overwhelming loss of his mother led Keats to have panic attacks (“John Keats: Childhood”). Regardless of the damage caused by his mother leaving him, when she returned in 1809 sick with tuberculosis, and Keats nursed her until her death the following year. After his mother's death, young John’s grandmother handed guardianship of her grandchildren over to Richard Abbey, a man who quickly revealed he did not value the children, only their inheritanc...
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Throughout one’s life, he or she will experience many situations where a lesson is learned, or a fear is amassed. One person may be able to deal with such terrors easily, while another will suffer because of the dread and panic that now haunts them. The poem ‘My Fear’ by Lawrence Raab discusses the haunting situation of fear following someone, and the personification, imagery, and tone of the speaker all provide depth to this seemingly innocent poem and allow one to truly appreciate how fear and troubles affect him or her.
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William Yeats is deliberated to be among the best bards in the 20th era. He was an Anglo-Irish protestant, the group that had control over the every life aspect of Ireland for almost the whole of the seventeenth era. Associates of this group deliberated themselves to be the English menfolk but sired in Ireland. However, Yeats was a loyal affirmer of his Irish ethnicity, and in all his deeds, he had to respect it. Even after living in America for almost fourteen years, he still had a home back in Ireland, and most of his poems maintained an Irish culture, legends and heroes. Therefore, Yeats gained a significant praise for writing some of the most exemplary poetry in modern history
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As the values of the 18th century shifted from formal perfection to experimentation, so did the poetry. The writings of the 19th century romantic poets explored new forms and variations of the sonnet; they moved away from the heroic couplet, which was dominant during the preceding century by writers like Pope. John Keats utilized this romantic method habitually throughout his works. In his 1819 poem “The Eve of St. Agnes”, Keats refashioned the traditional Spenserian allegory to explore sinful qualities, and personal virtues such as lust, whereas Edmund Spencer’s customary sonnet form usually expressed chivalric and Christian values. This recasting is significant because Spenser would have seen Keats’ virtues as immoral and corrupt, and Keats resents this through the poem, contrasting sins and reality with a religious dream state.
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Throughout Keats’s work, there are clear connections between the effect of the senses on emotion. Keats tends to apply synesthetic to his analogies with the interactions with man and the world to create different views and understandings. By doing this, Keats can arouse different emotions to the work by which he intends for the reader to determine on their own, based on how they perceive it. This is most notable in Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale, for example, “Tasting of Flora, and Country Green” (827). Keats accentuates emotion also through his relationship with poetry, and death.
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In order to experience true sorrow one must feel true joy to see the beauty of melancholy. However, Keats’s poem is not all dark imagery, for interwoven into this poem is an emerging possibility of resurrection and the chance at a new life. The speaker in this poem starts by strongly advising against the actions and as the poem continues urges a person to take different actions. In this poem, the speaker tells of how to embrace life by needing the experience of melancholy to appreciate the true joy and beauty of
Arguably one of John Keats’ most famous poems, “Ode to a nightingale” in and of itself is an allegory on the frail, conflicting aspects of life while also standing as a commentary on the want to escape life’s problems and the unavoidability of death. Keats’ poem utilizes a heavy amount of symbolism, simile and allusion to idealize nature as a perfect, almost mystical, world that holds no problems while using imagery taken from nature, combined with alliteration and assonance, to idealize the dream of escape from the problems life often presents; more specifically, aging and our inevitable deaths by allowing the reader to feel as if they are experiencing the speaker’s experience listening to the nightingale.
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Keats, John. “Letters: To George and Thomas Keats.” The Norton Anthology: English Literature. Ninth Edition. Stephen Greenblatt, eds. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012. 967-968. Print.
Keats is one of the greatest lovers and admirers of nature. In his poetry, we come across exquisitely beautiful descriptions of the wonder sigts and senses of nature. He looks with child-like delight at the objects of nature and his whole being is thrilled by what he sees and hears. Everything in nature for him is full of wonder and mystery - the rising sun, the moving cloud, the growing bud and the swimming fish.