Comparison of two poems by John Keats and Algernon Charles Swinburne

 

 

 

A BALLAD OF LIFE (1866*), by A. C. Swinburne.

 

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1    I found in dreams a place of wind and flowers,
2       Full of sweet trees and colour of glad grass,
3       In midst whereof there was
4    A lady clothed like summer with sweet hours.
5    Her beauty, fervent as a fiery moon,
6       Made my blood burn and swoon
7           Like a flame rained upon.
8    Sorrow had filled her shaken eyelids’ blue,
9    And her mouth’s sad red heavy rose all through
10         Seemed sad with glad things gone.

11  She held a little cithern by the strings,
12      Shaped heartwise, strung with subtle-coloured hair
13      Of some dead lute-player
14  That in dead years had done delicious things.
15  The seven strings were named accordingly;
16     The first string charity,
17         The second tenderness,
18  The rest were pleasure, sorrow, sleep, and sin,
19  And loving-kindness, that is pity’s kin
20         And is most pitiless.

21  There were three men with her, each garmented
22      With gold and shod with gold upon the feet;
23      And with plucked ears of wheat
24  The first man’s hair was wound upon his head.
25  His face was red, and his mouth curled and sad;
26      All his gold garment had
27          Pale stains of dust and rust.
28  A riven hood was pulled across his eyes;
29  The token of him being upon this wise
30         Made for a sign of Lust.

31  The next was Shame, with hollow heavy face
32      Coloured like green wood when flame kindles it.
33      He hath such feeble feet
34  They may not well endure in any place.
35  His face was full of grey old miseries,
36      And all his blood’s increase
37          Was even increase of pain.
38  The last was Fear, that is akin to Death;
39  He is Shame’s friend, and always as Shame saith
40          Fear answers him again.

41  My soul said in me; This is marvellous,
42      Seeing the air’s face is not so delicate
43     Nor the sun’s grace so great,
44  If sin and she be kin or amorous.
45  And seeing where maidens served her on their knees,
46      I bade one crave of these
47          To know the cause thereof.
48  Then Fear said: I am Pity that was dead.
49  And Shame said: I am Sorrow comforted.
50          And Lust said: I am Love.

51  Thereat her hands began a lute-playing
52      And her sweet mouth a song in a strange tongue;
53      And all the while she sung
54  There was no sound but long tears following
55  Long tears upon men’s faces waxen white
56      With extreme sad delight.
57          But those three following men
58  Became as men raised up among the dead;
59  Great glad mouths open and fair cheeks made red
60          With child’s blood come again.

61  Then I said: Now assuredly I see
62      My lady is perfect, and transfigureth
63      All sin and sorrow and death,
64  Making them fair as her own eyelids be,
65  Or lips wherein my whole soul’s life abides;
66      Or as her sweet white sides
67          And bosom carved to kiss.
68  Now therefore, if her pity further me,
69  Doubtless for her sake all my days shall be
70          As righteous as she is.

71  Forth, ballad, and take roses in both arms,
72      Even till the top rose touch thee in the throat
73  Where the least thornprick harms;
74      And girdled in thy golden singing-coat,
75  Come thou before my lady and say this;
76      Borgia, thy gold hair’s colour burns in me,
77          Thy mouth makes beat my blood in feverish rhymes;
78      Therefore so many as these roses be,
79          Kiss me so many times.
80  Then it may be, seeing how sweet she is,
81      That she will stoop herself none otherwise
82          Than a blown vine-branch doth,
83      And kiss thee with soft laughter on thine eyes,
84          Ballad, and on thy mouth.

from: http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/S/SwinburneAlgernonCharles/verse/p1/balladlife.html 1

 

 

   TO AUTUMN (1819), by John Keats.

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                                            1.

    1  SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
    2     Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
    3  Conspiring with him how to load and bless
    4      With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
    5  To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
    6     And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
    7          To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
    8  With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
    9      And still more, later flowers for the bees,
    10      Until they think warm days will never cease,
    11          For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

                                            2.

    12  Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
    13      Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
    14  Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
    15      Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
    16  Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
    17      Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
    18          Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
    19  And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
    20      Steady thy laden head across a brook;
    21      Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
    22          Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

                                            3.

    23  Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
    24      Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
    25  While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
    26      And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
    27  Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
    28      Among the river sallows, borne aloft
    29          Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
    30  And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
    31      Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
    32      The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
    33         And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

from: http://www.potw.org/archive/potw279.html 4

 

   In this paper I am going to make a comparison between two poems that belong at two different periods. The first one belongs to Algernon Charles Swinburne and the poem is called “A Ballad of Life”, (published in 1866*), representing the Victorian Era. The second one belongs to John Keats and the poem is called “To Autumn”, (published in 1819), representing the Romantic Period. In both cases, I will cover different aspects refers to poetry as the subject, the themes, the meaning, the structure and form, etc. Firstly, I will analyse Swinsburne’s poem and then, I will analyse Keats’ poem. Secondly, I will compare both poems trying to explain the differences and similarities. Finally, I will talk about the poets, their influences in each period and if their writing have had consequences in the history.

 

ANALYSIS OF “A  BALLAD  OF  LIFE”

 

   A “Ballad of Life” is a poem belonged to a major Swinburne’s work: “Poems and Ballads I” (1866). In this poem, we can interpret a strange dream in which the author mixes both happiness and sadness to represent the love towards his beloved. We can say that is an allegory for the speaker’s perception of his life talking about his loved where, although he seems to be in pleasure, the distance produces to the speaker that his blood “burn and swoon” (l.6).

   The first stanza starts in a first person “I found in dreams” (l.1), showing us a beautiful place where there is a beautiful lady which seems that is the speaker’s loved. Although at first all things are glad, the author starts talking us in negative adjectives like sorrow (l.8) and sad (l.9) to finish the stanza using an antithesis “seemed sad with glad things gone” (l.10).

   The second stanza starts explaining us that his beloved plays an instrument (a little cithern (l.11)) resembling a guitar in which appears seven strings (all with their names): charity, tenderness, pleasure, sorrow, sleep, sin and loving-kindness. This seven strings causes a great uncertainty to the reader due to these are qualities that the lady exudes, or whether she literally plays upon them in a more literal way. Personally, I thing these qualities belongs to the lady.

   In the next two stanzas, the lady describes three men. Their names are LUST, SHAME and FEAR. We can interpret those names as personifications of abstract concepts (like Greek Gods). In this case, the author uses another figure of speech. The description of three men give us a very vivid feeling:

   The first man’s hair was wound upon his head. (l.24) LUST

   The next was Shame, with hollow heavy face (l.31)

   The last was Fear, that is Akin to Death; (l.38)

The fifth stanza shows us the emotions that the three men feel towards her. This is the cause of the pain associated with loving her. They expresses their thoughts.

   Then Fear said: I am Pity that was dead (l.48)

   And Shame said: I am Sorrow comforted (l.49)

   And Lust said: I am Love (l.50)

In the next two stanzas the lady starts again to play her cithern causing the men 

   Long tears upon men’s faces waxen white,

   With extreme sad delight (ll. 55:56).

There is no doubt that the speaker visualizes his admiration to the lady providing his love.

   Doubtless for her sake all my days shall be

   As righteous as she is (ll. 69:70)

   The last stanza represent all the difficulty that the poem wanted transmit us. The lover completely gives in to the amalgam of pain and pleasure his love provides. In this last stanza the speaker uses an amount of arcaic forms like “thee” (l.72); “thou” (l.75); and “thy” (l.84). We can see how only the speaker begs her a kiss, “kiss me so many times” (l.79), whereas in fact she only bends towards him as a “blow vine-branch doth” (l.82), he will always see her as a sweet lady “how sweet she is” (l.80).  

   A Ballad of Life is a poem with different interpretations. It’s possible the story reflect us an unsuccessful love that Swinburne lived in the reality. Even so, this poem is a dream full of painful love, commenting on the anguish that this love can create in conjunction with its joy. The main ideas in the poem implies to show us a dreamlike vision as an allegory for the speaker’s perception of Swinburne’s life focusing on his beloved. Together with this, the title of the poem makes a reference to the medieval instrument called “cithern”, a guitar which his beloved played. She plays the cithern creating “ A Ballad of Life”

   She held a little cithern by the strings (l.11)

We can say that Swinburne uses an allusion here.

   We should remember that the poem belongs to “Poems and Ballads I”, published in 1866. This work contained sixty-two poems, which represented his major output in the first thirty years of his life. Even so, these poems produced outrage among the critics. For instance, according to Thomas, “Phaedra” deals with the incestuous passion of the heroine for the stepson; “Les Noyades” describes the fate of a man and a women tied in a naked embrace to be drowned for their crimes; “Anactoria” is Sappho’s violent declaration of lesbian passion; “Hermaphroditus” and “Fragoletta” celebrate the parallel theme of bisexualism; “Dolores” becomes to the litany of sadism (164). The content of “Poems and Ballads” made Swinburne famous, or infamous. Probably, “A Ballad of Life” has a content much more calm in contrast with the other ballads explained above.

   With regard to meaning, the poem presents us an ambiguous meaning expressing more than one possible explanation. In my opinion, the finallity of this is to show us his desire towards his beloved using allegories

   Made my blood burn and swoon (l.6)

   His mastery of vocabulary, rhyme and metre put him among the most talented English language poets in history. In this work, Swinburne uses an amount of negative words, combining with others that are positive:

   This amalgam of words explain Swinburne’s talent when he wrote poetry. Moreover, this mixture can be caused because of an obsessive love. Growing up, he had a very close relationship with a cousin, Mary Gordon, and was disconsolate when she married. For this reason, Swinburne blends anguish as well as joy in his work.

   The poem is built with eight stanzas and each of these are composed of ten verses, except the last stanza which contains fourteen verses. That is to say the poem is composed of eighty-four verses. Each stanza is an iambic metre consisting of ten lines of lenght 10-10-6-10-10-6-6-10-10-6. It has historically used in ballads. The last stanza has fourteen lines of lenght 10-10-6-10-10-10-10-10-6-10-10-6-10-6. As an example, the first stanza follows ABBACCDEED type, the same as the others. The last stanza is written with a rhyme scheme of ABABCDCDEFEGEG type.

 

   I found in dreams a place of wind and flowers,        A

       Full of sweet trees and colour of glad grass,         B
       In midst whereof there was                                  B
    A lady clothed like summer with sweet hours.         A
    Her beauty, fervent as a fiery moon,                       C
       Made my blood burn and swoon                         C
           Like a flame rained upon.                                D
    Sorrow had filled her shaken eyelids’ blue,              E
    And her mouth’s sad red heavy rose all through      E
         Seemed sad with glad things gone.                     D

 

   On the other hand, the grammatical person used in the poem is the first one. We can find the pronoun “I” in lines 1 and 46; the pronoun “me” in line 79. The use of the first person reflects the fact that the author was living the situation and then, he was narrating his personal experience, an impossible relation with his love.

 

ANALYSIS  OF  “TO AUTUMN”

 

   To Autumn is a poem written by the English Romantic poet John Keats in 1819. The poem celebrates the fruitfulness of the season and offers an elegiac lament for the passing of spring and summer. Critical comment on To Autumn has generally agreed that it is the most mature and satisfying of the Odes. Moreover, it is pretty generally agreed that it is the most objective and impersonal of them. For much critics, it is commonly regarded as an evocation of the sounds and sights of Autumn, expressive of placid fulfilment, and having no further suggestions.

   The first stanza describes the natural process of the Autumn. Keats describes the season with a series of visual images. Firstly, the stanza begins with the season at the top of his fulfillment and continues saying that the harvest is in its final stage of maduration

            Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, (l.1)

; then, Keats uses an opposite situation, explaining that one moviment culminates and other moviment will begin soon, the Winter:

            Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; (l.2)
            Conspiring with him how to load and bless (l.3)

The stanza follows expalining the ripeness of the fruits and how the “gourd” and the “hazell shells” is plumping and swelling

            With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; (l.4)
             To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees, (l.5)
             And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; (l.6)
            To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells (l.7)

Finally, the author talks about the bees and how they are deceived by “later flowers”

            Until they think warm days will never cease, (l.10)
            For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells. (l.11)

Process or change of the station is also suggested by the reference to Summer in line 11; the bees have been gathering and storing honey since summer.

   The second stanza starts with a rethorical question as well as using archaic forms like “hath”, “thee”, “oft”, and “thy” (l.11). Autumn is personified as a woman or a reaper in four postures of repose in harvest, how Abrams says in his book: “sitting relaxed in a granary, sleeping in the midday break in the harvest field, keeping steady her head beneath her load of gleanings, and watching the final oozings of the cider press” (443). This woman could be the image of Ruth, whose sad heart among the alien corn provided one of the most memorable passages in the “Ode to a Nightingale”, belongs to John Keats’ works. Compare “granary floor” (l.14), “winnowing wind” (l.15), “half-reap’d furrow” (l.16), “gleaner” (l.19), and “laden head” (l.20) must have been because she had left her own country and lived in a foreign land. The point of pause and the opposites offered to Keats’s imagination associative links with the context in “To Autumn”.

   During the stanza, Keats keeps on using archaic forms like “thee” (l.14), “thy” (ll. 15,17,20), and “thou” (ll.19,20). To sum up, we can say that this stanza refers to the passing of the time between Autumn and Winter is near

            Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours. (l.22)

The last stanza starts with other rethorical question claiming the songs of Spring:

            Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? (l.23)

   The music of Autumn which ends the poem is a music of living and dying, of staying and departure, of summer-winter. For this reason, we can answer to the question saying that the Spring died, Spring is past, the same thing will happen to the Autumn. And then, Keats will try not remember this situation praising Autumn’s songs:

            Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, (l.24)

   The Autumn’s songs are interpreted by “gnats” (l.27), “lambs” (l.30), “hedge-crickets” (l.31), “red-breasts” (l.32), and “swallows” (l.33). The verbs are used like songs or Autumn’s sounds: “mourn” (l.27), “bleat” (l.30), “sing” (l.31), “whistles” (l.32), and “twitter” (l.33). Although Keats accepts all aspects, Autumn is dying.

           While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, (l.25)

We can realise that he uses sadness to explain the final of the season and how animals, birds, and insects cry together for this:

           Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn (l.27)

   Keats composed his last great lyric poem on Sunday 19 September 1819 after enjoying a lovely Autumn day writting a letter to his friend J.H. Reynolds. “To Autumn” is generally included in critical discussion of Keats’s odes, though the poet did not explicity label it as such. The poem celebratess the fruitfulness of the season and offers an elegiac lament for the passing of spring and summer. According to John Strachan, “because of its status as Keats’s final major lyric, it has also been read as a deeply poignant poem, as if its eulogy of autumn, the season which heralds the “cold threshold” of winter, betokens an awareness, arguably even an acceptance, of physical decay and impeding death” (173).

   The central element in the concept of Autumn created by the poem is that the season is a boundary, a space between two opposite conditions, a moment of poise when one movement culminates and the succeeding movement has begun.

   With respect to the meaning, I think that exist ambiguity due to Keats uses personification in the second stanza and then, you can interpret that he refers both to the season or his own life: “ the appreciation of mutability or melancholy, or the acceptance of death, with the understanding that ripeness is all, which Keats personifies as Autumn” (222), explained Wolfson in her book.. Another important aspect Keats wanted transmit us was that he accepted the reality of the mixed nature of the world. According to Susan J. Wolfson, “in To Autumn we read a series of statements about the season’s beauties, then we are made to realize that all this beauty is dying, and finally, if we put these two contrary notions together, we understand that death is somehow beautiful” (254).

   The poem is built in three stanzas and each of these have eleven verses. That is to say that the poem is composed of thirty-three verses. Each verse, at the same time have ten syllables. The poem consists of three stanzas, each with eleven rimed lines. The rime scheme of the first stanza is ABABCDEDCCE; the rime scheme of the second and third stanzas is ABABCDECDDE. The example of the first stanza was:

        Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,                           A
        Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;                           B
        Conspiring with him how to load and bless                       A
        With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;            B
        To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,                C
        And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;                          D
        To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells                  E
        With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,                        D
        And still more, later flowers for the bees,                         C
        Until they think warm days will never cease,                     C
        For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.            E

and the example of the other form was:

        Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?         A
        Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—                    B
        While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,                  A
        And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;                        B
        Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn                      C
        Among the river sallows, borne aloft                                  D
        Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;                            E
        And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;              C
        Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft                    D
        The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;                      D
        And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.                        E

   According to Susan J. Wolfson, the absence of an “I” or the genderless figure of Autumn imply sujectivity (83). To Autumn affirms the abundance and unfailing beauty of nature, where transience and death join a perpetual cycle. That is to say that Keats doesn’t use grammatical person in his work.

   Another aspect to discuss is about the use of the languaje. In this poem, the author uses an amount of figures of speech to emphasize and give the poem a major credibility. In the first stanza, the speaker dramatizes an overall description of autumn and what happens during that time of year. Keats uses opposite terms like “mists and mellow fruitfulness”, “bosom-friend and conspiring”, “load and bless”. We can see that the stanza is strung with infinitives “to bend and fill; to swell and plump” In the second stanza, the author shifts his focus from a description to a direct address of the season, speaking to autumn as if it were a person, that is to say, using personification figure. This personification may also be found in the fields drowsing “with the fume of poppies”. Another figure of speech we can see is a rethorical question in the first verse, as well as the using of arcaic forms like “hath, thee, oft, thy...”. In the third stanza, the speaker shifts his focus again; he continues to address autumn as a person, but now he makes a one-point comparison of autumn with spring using another rethorical question in the first verse.

 

COMPARISON

   In this section I will try to compare two poems written by different authors. The first one belongs to Algernon Charles Swinburne and the poem is called “A Ballad of Life”, representing the Victorian Era. The second one belongs to John Keats and the poem is called “To Autumn”, representing the Romantic Period. The aim of this section is compare two different poems belonged to two different periods and finding similarities and differences in both.

   Swinburne’s poem is a strange dream in which he mixed both happiness and sadness to represent the love towards his beloved. Keats’s poem is wriiten to celebrate the fruitfulness of the season and offers an elegiac lament for the passing of spring and summer. In this brief description of the two poems we can find an amount of similarities as well as differences. The first aspect in which the two poets agree is when they uses their sentiments to write poetry. Swinburne appears happiness and sadness whereas Keat is celebrating the pass of the season as well as lamenting for the passing of seasons. Both authors agree in this aspect. Another similarity could be that “A Ballad of Life”represents the speaker’s love towards his beloved. In “To Autumn” the speaker represent his love towards the season. The sentiment of love symbolize in each author a different manner of expressing their sentiments.

The use of figure of speech such a personifications, opposites, and arcaic forms in both poems give a richness to the works. We can say that exist an enormous similarity in their writings because they used resemblance forms. Moreover, the finality of their writings are also similar. If Swinburne wrote his ballad towards his beloved, Keats makes the same towards a season (although some critics could think that he wrote towards a woman). In conclusion, both poets wrote to represent their sentiments in a similar way. Nowadays, their influence follow between us. As a sign of this influence is happen, Romantic and Victorian poets are studied for us. And this influence helps us to improve in our degree, learning a new subject and discovering news styles and thinkings linked with literature.

CONTEXTUALIZATION

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837 -1909) was a Victorian era English poet. For much of this century the term Victorian, which literally describes things and events in the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901), conveyed connotations of "prudish," "repressed," and "old fashioned." Although such associations have some basis in fact, they do not adequately indicate the nature of this complex, paradoxical age that was a second English Renaissance. Like Elizabethan England, Victorian England saw great expansion of wealth, power, and culture.

Swinburne’s poetry was highly controversial in its day, much of it containing recurring themes of sadomasochism, death-wish, lesbianism and irreligion. Swinburne was an alcoholic and algolagniac, and a highly excitable character. His health suffered as a result, and in 1879 at the age of 42 he had a mental and physical breakdown and was taken into care by his friend Theodore Watts, who looked after him for the rest of his life at No. 2 The Pines, Putney. Thereafter he lost his youthful rebelliousness and developed into a figure of social respectability. He died on the 10th April 1909 at the age of 72 and was buried at Bonchurch on the Isle of Wight.

It is clear that Swinburne had an addictive personality, one nearly incapable of moderation. His criticism is perceptive and useful but suffers from praise too lavish of the things he liked and attacks too vituperative on those that he didn't. His poetry follows the by now standard pattern of early flourish and later decline; some of the fresher pieces in the second and third series of Poems and Ballads (1878 and 1889) were actually written during his days at Oxford. Nevertheless, his last collection, A Channel Passage, has some lovely poems, including "The Lake of Gaube." He is best remembered as the supreme technician in metre, with a versatility which exceeds even Tennyson's, but which lacks a corresponding emotional range. His obsessions are not widely enough shared; and if he can not shock us by the strangeness of his desires nor the shrillness of his anti-theistical exclamations, often too little remains.

His poetic works includes:"Atalanta in Calydon”(1865), Poems and Ballads I (1866), Songs before Sunrise (1871), Poems and Ballads II, (1878) Tristram of Lyonesse (1882), Poems and Ballads III (1889), and the novel Lesbia Brandon (published posthumously).

John Keats (1795 –1821) was one of the principal poets of the English Romantic movement. Romanticism is a complex, self-contradictory artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated around the middle of the 18th century in Western Europe, and gained strength during the Industrial Revolution. It was partly a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature, and was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music and literature. The movement stressed strong emotion as a source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror, and the awe experienced in confronting the Sublimity in untamed nature and its qualities that are "Picturesque", both new aesthetic categories.

During his short life, Keats’s works received constant critical attacks from the periodicals of the day, but his posthumous influence on poets such as Alfred Tennyson has been immense. Elaborate word choice and sensual imagery characterize Keats's poetry, including a series of odes that were his masterpieces and which remain among the most popular poems in English literature. Keats's letters, which expound on his aesthetic theory of "negative capability", are among the most celebrated by any write.

Keats is the tragic figure of the Romantic movement who died young, but during his brief life he created some of the best known and enduring poetry of the 19th century.Born in London in 1795 Keats pursued a medical career as an apprentice surgeon but gave up the practice shortly after performing his first operation in 1816, an experience that affected him profoundly.His friendship with editor Leigh Hunt and his literary circle of friends encouraged Keats to write poetry. He suffered much criticism after his first major effort, Endymion, which was published in 1818, but Keats continued to write and examined his work more closely. Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, published in 1820, is widely regarded as some of the best poetry to have been written during the period.But in 1820 the first signs of consumption occurred. Despite moving to Italy to try and improve his condition Keats knew from his own medical training that his cause was lost. He died in Rome in 1821 at the tender age of 25. Keats wrote his own epitaph, which describes his belief that he would not be remembered: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water".

His death was to influence Shelley in particular, who wrote the poem Adonais in his honour and attacked critics for their harsh treatment of Keats' early work.

 

REFERENCES:

 

 

1 Tayler, Russell. Home page. 1 Jan. 2005. 15 Jan. 2008. <http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/S/SwinburneAlgernonCharles/verse/p1/balladlife.html>

2 Ringel, Meredith. English and History of Art 151. Brown University, 2004. The Victorian Web. 15 Jan. 2008. <www.victorianweb.org/authors/swinburne/ringel8.html>

3 Melani, Lilia. Home page. 2005. 15 Jan 2008.< http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/autumn.html>

4 Poem of the Week. PotW.org. Aug 1996. 15 Jan 2008.< http://www.potw.org/archive/potw279.html>

5 “To Autumn”. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 29 Nov 2007. 15 Jan 2008.< http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Autumn>

6 John Keats. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 10 Jan 2008. 15 Jan 2008.< http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Keats>

7 Algernon Charles Swinburne. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 2 Jan 2008. 15 Jan 2008.< http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algernon_Charles_Swinburne>

·        BOOKS:

8 Thomas, Donald. The Post-Romantics. London: Routledge, 1990.

9 Abrams, M.H. English Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975.

10 Wolfson, Susan J.. The Cambridge Companion to John Kears. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521651264

11 Strachan, John. The Poems of John Keats. London: Routledge, 2003.

12 Cook, Elizabeth. The Oxford Authors: John Keats. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

 

 

 

Academic year 2007/2008
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Ángel Ramón Martínez Peris
maranra@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press

 

 

 

 

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