John Keats Poetry Foundation. John Keats, who died at the age of twenty five, had perhaps the most remarkable career of any English poet. He published only fifty four poems, in three slim volumes and a few magazines. But at each point in his development he took on the challenges of a wide range of poetic forms from the sonnet, to the Spenserian romance, to the Miltonic epic, defining anew their possibilities with his own distinctive fusion of earnest energy, control of conflicting perspectives and forces, poetic self consciousness, and, occasionally, dry ironic wit. In the case of the English ode he brought its form, in the five great odes of 1. In his own lifetime John Keats would not have been associated with other major Romantic poets, and he himself was often uneasy among them. Outside his friend Leigh Hunts circle of liberal intellectuals, the generally conservative reviewers of the day attacked his work, with malicious zeal, as mawkish and bad mannered, as the work of an upstart vulgar Cockney poetaster John Gibson Lockhart, and as consisting of the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language John Wilson Croker. Although Keats had a liberal education in the boys academy at Enfield and trained at Guys Hospital to become a surgeon, he had no formal literary education. Yet Keats today is seen as one of the canniest readers, interpreters, questioners, of the modern poetic project which he saw as beginning with William Wordsworthto create poetry in a world devoid of mythic grandeur, poetry that sought its wonder in the desires and sufferings of the human heart. JOANS ANNOTATED RECOMMENDED READING LIST. This list of recommended authors and books about nonduality and waking up is based on my own tastes and resonances and is. Daily paper. Local, state, and wire news and commentary. Photo galleries, business and obituaries. Test your knowledge with amazing and interesting facts, trivia, quizzes, and brain teaser games on MentalFloss. com. On this page are articles that were featured on the front page during the golden years of Uncyclopedia meaning any year other than this year golden. Beyond his precise sense of the difficulties presented him in his own literary historical moment, he developed with unparalleled rapidity, in a relative handful of extraordinary poems, a rich, powerful, and exactly controlled poetic style that ranks Keats, with the William Shakespeare of the sonnets, as one of the greatest lyric poets in English. Keats was born in London on 3. October 1. 79. 5, the eldest of Thomas and Frances Jennings Keatss four children. Traditionally, he was said to have been born in his maternal grandfathers stable, the Swan and Hoop, near what is now Finsbury Circus, but there is no real evidence for this birthplace, or for the belief that his family was particularly poor. Thomas Keats managed the stable for his father in law and later owned it, providing the family an income comfortable enough for them to buy a home and send the older children, John and George 1. Enfield, run by the liberal and gifted teacher John Clarke. Young Tom Keats 1. Although little is known of Keatss early home life, it appears to have been happy, the family close knit, the environment full of the exuberance and clamor of a big city stable and inn yard. Frances Keats was a lively woman, tall and attractive, ardently devoted to her children, particularly her favorite, John, who returned that devotion intensely. Keatss father, recalled John Clarke, was a man of fine commonsense and native respectability, under whom the family business prospered, so that he hoped to send his son John to Harrow. At the age of eight Keats entered Enfield Academy and became friends with young Charles Cowden Clarke, the fifteen year old son of the headmaster. Clarke remembered an outgoing youth, who made friends easily and fought passionately in their defense He was not merely the favorite of all, like a pet prize fighter, for his terrier courage but his high mindedness, his utter unconsciousness of a mean motive, his placability, his generosity, wrought so general a feeling in his behalf, that I never heard a word of disapproval from any one, superior or equal, who had known him. He was not a shy, bookish child one of his schoolmates, Edward Holmes, later said that Keats was not in childhood attached to books. His penchant was for fighting. He would fight any one. On the night of 1. April 1. 80. 4, when Keats had been in school less than a year, an accident occurred that would alter his life and proved to be the first in a series of losses and dislocations that would pursue him throughout his brief life, certainly contributing to his mature sense that the career of the artist was an exploration of arts power to bring solace and meaning to human suffering. His father was seriously injured when his horse stumbled as he rode home, and he died the next day. The shock to the family was great, emotionally and financially. Within two months of her husbands death, Frances Keats had moved the children to her mothers home and remarried but the marriage soon proved disastrous, and it appears that, after losing the stables and some of her inheritance to her estranged husband, William Rawlings, the poets mother left the family, perhaps to live with another man. She had returned by 1. March 1. 80. 9. John became the oldest male in his family, and, to the end of his life, felt a fiercely protective loyalty to his brothers and sister, Fanny Keats. His most thoughtful and moving letters on poetrys relation to individual experience, to human suffering and spiritual development, were written to his brothers. At school, Keats drew closer to the headmaster, John Clarke, and his son, Cowden. He became, in fact, one of Clarkes favorite pupils, reading voraciously and taking first prizes in essay contests his last two or three terms. In some part this new academic interest was a response to his loneliness after his mothers death. But he had by then already won an essay contest and begun translating Latin and French. It is likely, then, that his mothers reappearance in 1. Keatss love for literature, and his association of the life of imagination with the politics of a liberal intelligentsia, really began in Clarkes school. It was modeled on the Dissenting academies that encouraged a broad range of reading in classical and modern languages, as well as history and modern science discipline was light, and students were encouraged to pursue their own interests by a system of rewards and prizes. Clarke himself was a friend of the radical reformers John Cartwright and Joseph Priestley and subscribed to Leigh Hunts Examiner, which Cowden Clarke said, no doubt laid the foundation of Keatss love of civil and religious liberty. Keatss sense of the power and romance of literature began as the Clarkes encouraged him to turn his energy and curiosity to their library. Cowden Clarke recalled his reading histories, novels, travel stories but the books that were his constantly recurrent sources of attraction were Tookes Pantheon, Lamprires Classical Dictionary, which he appeared to learn, and Spences Polymetis. This was the store whence he acquired his intimacy with the Greek mythology. On his own, Keats translated most of the Aeneid and continued learning French. Literature for him was more than a dreamy refuge for a lonely orphan it was a domain for energetic exploration, realms of gold, as he later wrote, tempting not only as a realm of idealistic romance but also of a beauty that enlarges our imaginative sympathies. All through his life his friends remarked on his industry and his generosity literature for Keats was a career to be struggled with, fought for, and earned, for the sake of what the poets struggle could offer humankind in insight and beauty. This impression recurs often in accounts of Keats, this pugnacity of one who fought his way into literary circles, and this compassion for others that justifies the literary career. Of course, at this point, when Keats was only fifteen or sixteen, a literary career was not a serious thought. In 1. 81. 0 Alice Whalley Jennings, Keatss grandmother, was seventy five, and in charge of the four orphaned children, John, George then thirteen, Tom eleven, and Fanny seven. She had inherited a considerable sum from her husband, John Jennings who died in 1. Richard Abbey, a tea merchant who, on the advice of her attorney, she appointed to act as trustee. Most of Keatss later financial misery can be traced to this decision. If Abbey was no villain, he was nevertheless narrow minded and conventional, and, where money was concerned, niggardly and often deceitful. He dispensed the childrens money grudgingly and often lied or freely interpreted the terms of the bequest it was not until 1. Fanny Keats came of age, that she finally forced a legal settlement. It has been estimated that by the time of Keatss death in 1.
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