The Legacy

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John Keats was a Romantic poet that, despite his short 25 years of life is regarded as one of the most remarkable English poets of his time. After losing his father to a stable accident and his mother to tuberculosis before the age of 15 Keats left school to study medicine in London, however his career in medicine never took off and he left it to pursue his love of literature. In 1819 Keats contracted tuberculosis after taking care of his brother who had fallen ill earlier that year. As Keats battled with the death of his brother and eventually the diagnosis of his own disease he wrote some of his most famous poems including “When I have fears that I may cease to be.”
Keats, having been faced with death at an early age and then having to face his own imminent death at the height of his literary career was forced to realize all of the things he would not be able to accomplish before his passing. Through a plethora of literary techniques, Keats effectively describes his fear of premature death in one of his more famous poems.
In his poem “When I have fears that I may cease to be” Keats reveals that art cannot provide the immortality it promises (White 146). One of Keats major philosophies is called negative capability; it was a stance that allowed Keats to dwell on the uncertainties of life without trying to make sense of it. Keats believed that the inspirational power of beauty was more important than the quest for facts. Evidence of this theory can be seen throughout many of his works, including this one. In “When I have fears that I may cease to be” Keats focuses on the beauty of the world around him and all of the possibilities that it holds.
Keats writes this poem in the form of a Shakespearian sonnet with an iambi...

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...is final couplet the speaker realizes that love and fame in their literary pretensions don’t matter as much as the lived experience (Stockwell 148).
Keats, through the use of his own experience of the fears he had was effectively able to illustrate a common fear among many people; the fear that he will not be able to experience everything or leave anything worthy behind after his death.

Works Cited
Melani, Lilia. "Keats: When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be"" Keats: When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be" Brooklyn College, 13 Feb. 2009. Web. 04 Apr. 2014.
Stockwell, Peter. Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 2002. 146-48. Print.
Vendler, Helen. The Odes of John Keats. Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard UP, 1983. 234-35. Print.
White, Keith D. John Keats and the Loss of Romantic Innocence. Vol. 107. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996. 146-47. Print.

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