BIOGRAPHY:
John Keats was born in 1785 and died in 1821, he died very young as his colleagues Byron and
Shelley.
Byron said that Keats dead because of an anger
attack due to the bad critics he had received during his life but it is a
literary legend.
The writer started studying medicine but he soon
changed it to literature that was what he really liked.
Keats had a difficult childhood; his mother died
of tuberculosis and his brother Tom had also the same disease. He had to move
to
This author had a short life but he left very
good poems. He knew that he was going to be between the best.
Keats had a sad life mixed with tragedy.
Keats found his way of explanation through his
letters.
His odes were round poems, very well built in
relation to technique, if you omit a word it has no meaning for the reader and
these ones are his most important genre.
He was one of the romantic poets, this group was
formed by: Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Blake and himself.
Romanticism was a movement that consisted
on: "the reaction against the
scientific rationalization of nature in art and literature" and because of
that, the majority of these author´s poems are
about nature and things like that.
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Keats
http://www.online-literature.com/keats/
What is Romanticism?
Romanticism is an artistic, literal and
intellectual movement that started in the middle of the eighteen century in
Romanticism not only affected society but also
literature, music and architecture.
This period reflects in society calm, harmony,
order, balance, idealization and rationality.
The most important characteristics of
Romanticism are: the attitude rejected to nature, which is considered the most
beautiful thing we can observe and the exaltation of emotions over
the intellect.
Romanticism is considered as an opposition to
the Enlightment period.
The Romantic period in relation to literature
was divided into two.
Romanticism started in the 1790´s with the
publication of “Lyrical Ballads”, written by William Wordsworth and
Samuel Coleridge.
The second part of this period was marked by
Nationalism and Folklore and its literature has to do with works and poetry
which have as main theme the Supernatural.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9083836/Romanticism
TO AUTUMN:
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings
hours by hours.
Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, -
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
http://www.bartleby.com/126/47.html
EXPLANATION OF THE
POEM:
The poem itself is structured in three stanzas, each
of them formed by eleven lines and each line is metered in a
iambic pentameter.
Inside the stanza there is a subdivision, from
lines 1 to 4 the rhyme scheme is ABAB and from lines
This poem has originality, rotundity.
There is an internal temporality in the poem, it advances in a chronological order.
What we can highlight about this play is that
the passage of time is not bad at all because it permits you to notice in a
more detailed way all the things that surround us.
First paragraph (from lines to 1 to
11):
This first paragraph is structured as an only
sentence and it talks about tactile sensations.
Vegetable kingdom dominates these lines as we
can see in examples such as: "Hazel shells", "fruit",
"flowers", "apples",...
With the word "fruitfulness" he is
referring to the continuity of life.
In relation to the rhythm we can emphasize the
words "sun" (line 2) which rhyms with
"run" (line 4) and "fruitfulness" (line 1) which rhymes
with "bless" (line 3).
From lines 3 to 9, Keats constructs the details
using a rhetorical figure as it is parallelism, the details take the infinitive
form (to+verb) as we can see in the following
examples: "to load and bless," "To bend...and fill,"
"To swell...and plump," and "to set."
On the other hand, the use of -ing indicates that there is an action that is ongoing or
continuing.
Second paragraph (from lines 12 to
22):
This stanza is structured firstly making a
question and then, answering it by only a sentence.
It talks about human perception through vision,
the sensations humans perceive through their eyes as something material.
In this second paragraph, the "autumn"
is personified by using the verb sleep and other verbs that normally refers to people
and not to concepts or objects.
Autumn is for the author as a sort of Goddess.
Third paragraph (from lines 23 to
33):
This last paragraph is equally structured as the
previous one; a question and its answer.
Here, we can find an enormous contrast between
life and death symbolized by spring and autumn, spring is the season in which
flowers and leaves start their lives while in autumn both two dead, disappear.
Here we can perceive auditive
sensations, because of that, in this lines Keats make a reference to music,
music had a great importance between romantic poets.
There also appear references to the field of
animals.
Keats accept death as
something that must happen but he introduces elements and vocabulary that
produce sadness.
In this final part, the reader doesn´t know if the summer is going to finish or if
the autumn is going to start. There is a persistence and hope in the continuity
of life.
Only by reading the title of the poem we can
observe that Autumn has to do with nature, it is the
name of one of the four seasons of the year. For Romantic poets, nature was
considered as one of the most important themes to treat in their poetical work.
Nature can affect someone’s feelings as well as the world itself.
The contact with autumn makes the author feeling
the happiness, every sensation that nature produce is for Keats something
magic.
The poem in this case, doesn’t seem to be
fantastic, it is too real eventough there is no
narrative voice.
The author loves this “autumn” but
at the same time Keats accepts that it has to die and winter has to come.
IN RELATION TO ALL HIS WORKS:
"To Autumn" is considered as one of
the simplest Keats's odes.
In comparison to his poem, "Ode on
Melancholy" which presents itself as a strenuous heroic quest, "To
Autumn" is concerned with the quieter activity of daily observation and
appreciation of things. The poem is grounded in the real world; a vivid,
certain imagery that immerses the reader in the sights, feelings and sounds of
autumn and its progression. With its depiction of the progression of autumn,
the poem is an unqualified celebration of process, the process of fruition and
decay in this season.
On the other hand, as in all the rest of his
poems, there appears a Goddess, in this case, the Autumn.
Reading Keats´ previous odes in which pain
and frighten is present, we can notice that this author uses a meaningful and
sincere way to know and accept the beauties. So we can say that this poem makes
a reference to the previous ones John Keats wrote, especially to "When I
have fears that I may cease to be" in which connects directly through a
metaphor that deals to the "harvest".
As a
difference to the rest of Keats´ writings, there is no narrative voice at
all
All Romantic poets use to base their works
around the same main themes: Nature, God,… because it was the typical at
that time but in each poems and line is completely different from the
following, we can observe lots of differences in the vocabulary used as well as
in the rhetorical figures, the rhyme,…
http://englishhistory.net/keats/poetry/odeonmelancholy.html
NOTES ABOUT THE POEM:
This poem was written
"To autumn" is classified as a lyric
poem and inside of lyrics it is an ode.
Last years of Keats´ life in which he
wrote some of his most important works were as
productive as the autumn he describes in the poem we are commenting.
Harmon said that To Autumn "is
the most anthologized poem in the English language."
Harold Bloom calls it "one of the subtlest
and most beautiful of all Keats's odes, and as close to perfect as any shorter
poem in the English Language."
Allen Tate agrees that it "is a very nearly
perfect piece of style"; however, "it has little to say."
http://www.potw.org/archive/potw279.html
Conclusion:
By doing this paper I have learnt what Romanticism
is and at the same time I have learnt who John Keats was because until this
year I did not know so much about poetry.
On the other hand I have found it very
interesting because sometimes we are not well prepared to face cultural
questions and it is very important in our daily life.
All historical periods have their own
characteristic that we must recognize and we should know how to explain why,
when and where important events happened.