2023年4月浙江自考英美文学选读复习笔记：John Keats

John Keats (1795-1821) was born in London, the son of a livery-stable owner who died when the boy was nine. Keats was educated at the Clarke's School where his first inclination toward poetry was initiated by his friend Cowden Clarke, the son of the school headmaster. At the age of fifteen when his mother died, Keats left school and was apnticed to Thomas Hammond, a surgeon and apothecary. Subsequently, from 1815 to 1816, Keats studied medicine at Guy's Hospital in London. In 1816 he became a licensed apothecary but did not practice much of his profession; instead he turned to devote himself to poetry. Even during his years of apnticeship, he was occupied with poetry, reading much of Spenser, Milton and Homer. It was Spenser who awakened in Keats his dormant poetic gift, and the first verses which he wrote were in imitation of the Elizabethan poetry. Besides the classical elements, Hunt, the radical journalist and minor poet, was a vital influence on the early Keats, cultivating him with a taste for liberal politics as well as for the fine arts.

Keats' first important poem "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" was published in 1816 in the paper, Examiner, run by Hunt. In 1817, he published his first volume of poems, and one of the good poems in this volume was "Sleep and Poetry," which exssed his own poetic aspirations. Endymion, published in 1818, was a poem based on the Greek myth of Endymion and the moon goddess. In this poem, Keats described his imagination in an enchanted atmosphere -- a lovely moon-lit world where human love and ideal beauty were merged into one. Endymion marked a transitional phase in Keats's poetry, though he himself was not satisfied with it. But the reviewers of Blackwood's Magazine, the Quarterly Review and the British Critic launched savage attacks on Keats, declaring Endymion to be sheer nonsense, recommending that Keats give up poetry and go back to the chemist's, and calling the romantic verse of Hunt's literary circle "the Cockney School of poetry. “

At the close of 1817, while Keats was finishing Endymion, he came to realize the artist's need for more complex experience. So he set out, with a friend, on a walking tour to the Lake Country and'to Scotland. This was Keats's first sight of real mountains, and he gloried in the grand scenery. After his return from the tour, Keats became ill with tuberculosis, from which he had never quite recovered. And other griefs and troubles crowded in upon him. First his dearly loved brother, Tom, died; then he was in trouble about money; the cruel criticisms of his poetry hurt him at the same time; and to this already overcharged heart something else was added: he fell in love. However, love brought to him no joyful rest, but rather passionate jealous restlessness. For he could not marry the one he loved due to his poverty and poor health. It was this yearning and suffering that quickened his maturity and added a new dimension to his poetry.

From 1818 to 1820, Keats reached the summit of his poetic creation. In July 1820, the third and best of his volumes of poetry, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, was published. The three  poems all deal with mythical and legendary themes of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance times. At the heart of these poems lies Keats's concern with how the ideal can be joined with the real, the imagined with the actual, and man with woman. The volume also contains his four great odes: "Ode on Melancholy," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," “Ode to a Nightingale,”  "Ode to Psyche;" his lyric masterpiece "To Autumn" and the unfinished poem "Hyperion." In the fall of 1820, under his doctor's orders to seek a warm climate for the winter, Keats went to Rome.  He died there on Feb. 23, 1821, and was buried in the Protestant cemetery.

The odes are generally regarded as Keats's most important and mature works. Their subject matter, however, is the poet's abiding occupation with the imagination as it reaches out to union with the beautiful. In the greatest of these works, he also suggests the under current of disillusion that accompanies such ecstasy, the human suffering which forever questions the visionary transcendence achieved by art.

"Ode to a Nightingale" exsses the contrast between the happy world of natural loveliness and human world of agony. Here the aching ecstasy roused by the bird's song is felt like a form of spiritual homesickness, a longing to be at one with beauty. The poem first introduces joy and sorrow, song and music, death and rapture which free him into the world of dream. Opiates and wine at first seem the way to this union and to the attainment of a rapture which transcends the human misery. Eventually however poetry itself is seen as the most effective means to release misery, a vehicle to reach paradise. By combining a tingling anticipation with a lapsing towards dissolution, Keats manages to keep a carious balance between mirth and despair, rapture and grief. Inspired by the nightingale's song, his thoughts now ascend from the transfigured physical world, through the imagined ecstasy of death, to the timeless sent of the nightingale's song. A world of beauty is here visualized through the power of language. But the excitement created through words is also subtly destroyed by them. The ultimate imaginative view of "faery lands forlorn" evaporates in its extremity as the full associations of the last word "toll" the poet back from his near-loss of selfhood to the real and human world of sorrow and death.

"Ode on an Grecian Urn" shows the contrast between the permanence of art and the transience of human passion. The poet has absorbed himself into the timeless beautiful scenery on the antique Grecian urn: the lovers, musicians and worshippers on the urn exist simultaneously and for ever in their intensity of joy. They are unaffected by time, stilled in expectation. This is at once the glory and the limitation of the world conjured up by an object of art. The urn celebrates but simplifies intuitions of ecstasy by seeming to deny our painful knowledge of transience and suffering. But in the last stanza, the urn becomes a "Cold Pastoral," which sents his ambivalence about time and the nature of beauty. Keats's poetry is always sensuous, colorful and rich in imagery, which exsses the acuteness of his senses. Sight, sound, scent, taste and feeling are all taken in to give an entire understanding of an experience.  He has the power of entering the feelings of others either human or animal. He declared once that when he saw a bird on the lawn, he entered imaginatively into the life of the bird. Keats delights to dwell on beautiful words and phrases which sound musical. He draws diction, style and imagery from works of Shakespeare, Milton and Dante. With vivid and rich images, he paints poetic pictures full of wonderful color.

In his short writing career of six or seven years, Keats produced a variety of kinds of work, including epic, lyric and narrative poems. The mythic world of the ancient Greece and the English poetry of the Renaissance period provide Keats with the most important imaginative resources. And his realization of the empathic power of the imagination is of the greatest consequence to his work and is a faculty which, as his thought and technique matured, leads him to his most profound insights. Keats's poetry, characterized by exact and closely knit construction, sensual descriptions, and by force of imagination, gives transcendental values to the physical beauty of the world. Critics agree that Keats is, with Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth, one of the indisputably great English poets. And his mighty poems will no doubt have a lasting place in the history of English literature.