JOHN KEATS

JOHN KEATS

1. Literary context:

The literary context that deals with John keats is the Romanticism; and may be some people refer him to be one of the most important authors from this movement. The Romanticism was a cultural and political movement that was born in Germany at the end of the 18^th century during the Industry Revolution.

It grew in the first part of the nineteenth century and was influenced by different ideas which helped it to give some influence in literature, music and art.

Keats developed his poetic theories, chief among them Negative Capability and The Mansion of Many Apartments, in letters to friends and family. In particular, he stated he wished to be a "chameleon poet" and to resist the "egotistical sublime" of Wordsworth's writing. Oscar Wilde, the aestheticist non pareil was to later write: "[...] who but the supreme and perfect artist could have got from a mere colour a motive so full of marvel: and now I am half enamoured of the paper that touched his hand, and the ink that did his bidding, grown fond of the sweet comeliness of his charactery, for since my childhood I have loved none better than your marvellous kinsman, that godlike boy, the real Adonis of our age[...] In my heaven he walks eternally with Shakespeare and the Greeks."

This movement has some different characteristic:

- Subjective opinions.

- New themes and situations.

- The grow of the popular poems, tradition in general.

- Put an emphasis in the feelings.

- Lost of reality.

- The importante from the feelings to the knowledge.

The beginings ot the Romanticism took place with poets like Wordsworth and his Baladas líricas, Young with Pensamientos nocturnos o may be William Blake. Lord Byron,Percy Bysse Shelley

and John Keats are too importants poets of the English Romanticism.

Alter that, Thomas De Quincey, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and his husband Robert Browning, the last was the creator of the modern poetic.

The historical moment when the poem was written and published was “Romanticism”. So here there is an explication about this literary movement based on Wikipedia.

Romanticism is an artistic, literary and intellectual movement originated about the middle of the 18^th century in Western Europe, during the Industrial Revolution. This term has been used to refer to certain artists, poets, writers, musicians, and political, philosophical and social thinkers too. All of these people were of the late 18^th century and early 19^th century. But what is true is that the specific definition of Romanticism has been mostly subject of lots of debates in some fields such as intellectual history and literary history .

But what really interest us is the term Romanticism inside literature. Romanticism in literature typically refers to the late 18^th century and the 19^th century. The most important terms found in Romantic literature are the criticism of the past, emphasis on women and children, and respect for the nature. Now we can see that in the poem The autumn we find the theme of the respect of the nature so we can see the relation.

Romanticism in Britain literature is mostly associated with the poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. But Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley and john Keats constitute another phase of romanticism in Britain. Some of the best regarded poets of the time were in fact women. Yet educated women were targets of masculine scorn.

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticismo

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Keats

2. Biography:

John Keats was considered as one of the most principal Britannic poets from the romantic movement. He was born in London. John Keats was born on 31 October 1795 in London. His father worked at a livery stable, but died in 1804. His mother re-married, but died of tuberculosis in 1810.

During his first years of his childhood had a happy life but in 1803, his father died and the problems arrived. His mother got married soon, but broke off that relationship and they had to go to their grandmother house. In that place was where Keats started to love the literature. But his mother died and He had to look after his grandmother. until 1814 when Keats started to learn more of the literature.

Keats was educated at a school in Enfield. When he left at 16, he was apprenticed to a surgeon. He wrote his first poems in 1814. In 1816, he abandoned medicine to concentrate on poetry. His first volume of poetry was published the following year.

His introduction to the work of Edmund Spenser, particularly The Faerie Queene, was to prove a turning point in Keats' development as a poet; it was to inspire Keats to write his first poem, Imitation of Spenser. He befriended Leigh Hunt, a poet and editor who published his first poem in 1816. In 1817, Keats published his first volume of poetry entitled simply Poems. Keats' Poems was not well received, largely due to his connection with the controversial Hunt. Keats produced some of his finest poetry during the spring and summer of 1819; in fact, the period from September 1818 to September 1819 is often referred to among Keats scholars as the Great Year, or the Living Year, because it was during this period that he was most productive and that he wrote his most critically acclaimed works. Several major events have been noted as factors in this increased productivity: namely, the death of his brother Tom, the critical reviews of Endymion, and his meeting of Fanny Brawne.

The famous odes he produced during the spring and summer of 1819 include: Ode to Psyche, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on Melancholy, and To Autumn. Keats developed his poetic theories, chief among them Negative Capability and The Mansion of Many Apartments, in letters to friends and family.

From September 1819, Keats produced little more poetry. His financial difficulties were now severe. He became engaged to Fanny Brawne, but with no money there was little prospect of them marrying.

Early in 1820, Keats began to display symptoms of tuberculosis. His second volume of poetry was published in July, but he was by now very ill. In September, Keats and his friend Joseph Severn left for the warmer weather of Italy, in the hope that this would improve Keats' health. When they reached Rome, Keats was confined to bed. Severn nursed him devotedly, but Keats died in Rome on 23 February 1821. He was buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome.

In particular, he stated he wished to be a "chameleon poet" and to resist the "egotistical sublime" of Wordsworth's writing. Oscar Wilde, the aestheticist non pareil was to later write: "[...] who but the supreme and perfect artist could have got from a mere colour a motive so full of marvel: and now I am half enamoured of the paper that touched his hand, and the ink that did his bidding, grown fond of the sweet comeliness of his charactery, for since my childhood I have loved none better than your marvellous kinsman, that godlike boy, the real Adonis of our age[...] In my heaven he walks eternally with Shakespeare and the Greeks."

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Keats

http://www.john-keats.com/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/keats_john.shtml

3. Influencies:

The growing of the popular literature, the balade, are the main characteristic of the feelings that experiment this important author of the English Romanticism.

Keats´ poetry is characterize by an exuberant and imaginary language with some kina of melancholy. Frequently, Keats had the sensation to work behind of previous poets.

From another hand we have to look at dos important styles that keats choose from other and may be they found keats become to the fame.

An ode is a form of stately and elaborate lyrical verse. A classic ode is structured in three parts: the strophe, the antistrophe, and the epode. Different forms such as the homostrophic ode and the irregular ode also exist.

The ballade is a verse form typically consisting of three eight-line stanzas, each with a consistent metre and a particular rhyme scheme. The last line in the stanza is a refrain, and the stanzas are followed by a four-line concluding stanza (an envoi) usually addressed to a prince. The rhyme scheme is therefore usually 'ababbcbC ababbcbC ababbcbC bcbC', where the capital 'C' is a refrain.

Inside the influences of Keats, we have to name Spenser because,this man helped keats to look at the literature like something new and important in his life.

.http://www.rmm.cl/index_sub.php?id_contenido=8585&id_seccion=3517&id_portal=532:

http://www.hiru.com/es/euskal_literatura/euskal_literatura_00150.html

http://www.edukativos.com/biografias/biografia2869.html

Keats is not quite at his best, not quite himself, in this imitative Ballad,—which, alone among his poems, is admirable rather for the picturesqueness of the whole, than, (as with Lamia or the Nightingale), for the equal wealth of the details also.

LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI

Oh what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.

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

I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever-dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.

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

I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery's song.

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

She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she wept and sighed full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.

And there she lulled me asleep
And there I dreamed - Ah! woe betide! -
The latest dream I ever dreamt
On the cold hill 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!'

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

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

. http://www.pathguy.com/lbdsm.htm

http://www.bartleby.com/126/1000.html#55

This poem is a balad; defined as: “a relatively short narrative poem, written to be sung, with a simple and dramatic action. The ballads tell of love, death, the supernatural, or a combination of these. Two characteristics of the ballad are incremental repetition and the ballad stanza. Incremental repetition repeats one or more lines with small but significant variations that advance the action. The ballad stanza is four lines; commonly, the first and third lines contain four feet or accents, the second and fourth lines contain three feet. Ballads often open abruptly, present brief descriptions, and use concise dialogue”.

The poem “La belle dame sans merci”, is one of the most commonly poems of Keats, and it deals with a ballade. He wrote it in 1819, but that poem was not published until his death.

No much of the writing of the poem, Keats have a dream in which there was a very beautiful woman, in the magic place but full of lovers. So, in that idea was his first base of the poem and with a Spenser poem where the author was the main character in the plot and was a heroin.

"La Belle Dame sans Merci" seems easy to understand at the narrative level. An unidentified passerby asks the knight what is wrong (stanzas I-III). The knight answers that he has been in love with and abandoned by a beautiful lady (stanzas IV-XII). Because Keats is imitating the folk ballad, he uses simple language, focuses on one event, provides minimal details about the characters, and makes no judgments. Some details are realistic and familiar, others are unearthly and strange. As a result, the poem creates a sense of mystery which has intrigued many readers.

The poem describes the meeting between an unknown gentleman and a mysterious fairy.the part of the poem in which this dos characters is an inhospitable place. He tells to the reader that the gentleman meet a beautiful woman who eyes are savages.

It talks about dos characters ride on the horse and went on some different places; and so it talks about they were sleeping together when the gentleman has a strange dream in which there was a king, the prince and the warriors which were pallid, like they were death.

Suddenly they arrived to the reality, He Looked at himself like the prince and the rest of the men. The conclusion is that they are slaves of the lady.

The poem has also puzzled most readers. What does the poem mean? What is the nature of La Belle Dame sans Merci? What is the meaning of the knight's experience? Why has the knight, one of Keats's dreamers, been ravaged by the visionary or dream experience? What is the meaning of the dream? Was the knight deluded by his beloved or did he delude himself?

The external structure of the poem is one composition not much long and it is based on twelve strophes and each one contain four verses. He used ABCB.

5. A little comment of the picture “La belle dame sans merci”.

Another pont that I like to talk is about this ballade because it was very famous and a different form of representation of this poem.

In that picture we can see this idea of pre-rafaelist woman, a feminist woman which use her seduction to control the gentleman. Keats teach us a new vision totally different of the woman from that period; Powerful woman, safe female who knows very well what she wants. The men, by contrast, seem like weak person.

And the last point, would be the landscape and the period in which its occur if we look at the chapter clothes.

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/belle.html#general

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/belle.html

http://www.bartleby.com/126/55.html

6. Bibliography:

1 http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticismo.

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Keats.

3.http://www.rmm.cl/index_sub.php?id_contenido=8585&id_seccion=3517&id_portal=532:

4. http://www.hiru.com/es/euskal_literatura/euskal_literatura_00150.html

5. http://www.edukativos.com/biografias/biografia2869.html.

6. http://www.pathguy.com/lbdsm.htm.

7. http://www.bartleby.com/126/55.html

8. http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/belle.html

9. http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/lit_term.html#ballad

10.http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/belle.html#genera

11. http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/belle.html#title

12. http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/belle.html#sig