Week 8 Extra Credit Reading Notes : The Life and Death of John Keats

John Keats 1795–1821 (403-407, 410-415)

John Keats “...one of the greatest of all English poets in a career that lasted less than five years. “

(403)

He suffered many tragedies in his life such as when his mother and brother died of tuberculosis.

(403 and 404).

His mother was miserable in her second marriage (after her husband died) and left her children. But

returned when she began to die. He nursed her as well as he could but she did die when he was 14

years old. (404)

Quote at the end of 1818 Keats’s Younger brother Tom died of tuberculosis, and the public threw

himself into writing, producing all of his greatest work in just one remarkable year: “ (404) - he took

his pain and transformed it into beautiful expressions of love and loss. The humanity and mortality of

all that is life is encompassed in the stories he tells.

“Keats’s Guardian decided to apprentice him to a surgeon. These were the days before anesthesia,

which meant patience with gripe and pain under the surgeons knife. Kids found this horrifying, and

he stayed with his medical training only long enough to become an apothecary – lowest wrong

medical letter – before dedicating himself to writing poetry.” (404)

“Cockneys are working-class Londoners from the heart of the city, and this name conveyed

contempt for what critics saw as the poets’ low social class, lack of education, and vulgarity.”

“Even more shockingly, they delighted in erotic imagery and sensuous language, which invited

readers to linger on bodily pleasures: “ delicious quote was a particular favorite.” (404)

“Written in a full awareness of a terrifying mortality, Keats’s poetry exults in the intensity of bodily,

sensual experience. “ (403) - such interesting ideas to mix but yet he is hailed for it.

He was quite passionate and fell in love with his neighbor named Fanny Brawne. But unfortunately

his terrible health and growing poverty stopped him from every proposing marriage. Their love is

doomed from the start. (404)

In the poem When I have fears that I make cease to be he writes a line that says “Huge cloudy

symbols of high romance, and think that I may never live to trace their shadows, with the magic hand

of chance; and when I feel, fair creature of an hour, that I shall never look upon thee more, never

have relish in the ferry power of unreflecting love; -“ (407) - I feel this is about his

Doomed love with Fanny and how he longed for a life with her but knew he could not have it. He

concluded the poem with “Of The wide world I stand alone, and think to love and fame to

nothingness do sink. “

Ode to a nightingale (411)

“My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense, As though of hemlock I had drunk, or

emptied some dull opiate to the drains”- I think he is talking about suicide in the face of a broken

heart.