John Keats英文简介

John Keats

John Keats (1795-1821), major English poet, despite his early death from

tuberculosis at the age of 25. Keats’s poetry describes the beauty of the natural

world and art as the vehicle for his poetic imagination. His skill with poetic imagery

and sound reproduces this sensuous experience for his reader. Keats’s poetry

evolves over his brief career from this love of nature and art into a deep

compassion for humanity. He gave voice to the spirit of Romanticism in literature

when he wrote, “I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s

affections, and the truth of imagination.” Twentieth-century poet T. S. Eliot judged

Keats's letters to be 'the most notable and the most important ever written by any

English Poet,” for their acute reflections on poetry, poets, and the imagination.

II Early Life

Keats was born in north London, England. He was the eldest son of Thomas

Keats, who worked at a livery stable, and Frances (Jennings) Keats. The couple had

three other sons, one of whom died in infancy, and a daughter. Thomas Keats died

in 1804, as a result of a riding accident. Frances Keats died in 1810 of tuberculosis,

the disease that also took the lives of her three sons.

From 1803 to 1811 Keats attended school. Toward the end of his schooling, he

began to read widely and even undertook a prose translation of the Aeneid from

the Latin. After he left school at the age of 16, Keats was apprenticed to a surgeon

for four years. During this time his interest in poetry grew. He wrote his first poems

in 1814 and passed his medical and druggist examinations in 1816.

III Life as a Poet

In May 1816 Keats published his first poem, the sonnet 'O Solitude,' marking

the beginning of his poetic career. In writing a sonnet, a 14-line poem with a strict

rhyme scheme, Keats sought to take his place in the tradition established by great

classical, European, and British epic poets. The speaker of this poem first expresses

hope that, if he is to be alone, it will be in “Nature’s Observatory”; he then

imagines the “highest bliss” to be writing poetry in nature rather than simply

observing nature. In another sonnet published the same year, 'On First Looking

into Chapman's Homer,' Keats compares reading translations of poetry to

awe-inspiring experiences such as an astronomer discovering a new planet or

explorers first seeing the Pacific Ocean. In “Sleep and Poetry,” a longer poem

from 1816, Keats articulates the purpose of poetry as he sees it: “To soothe the

cares, and lift the thoughts of man.” Within a year of his first publications Keats

had abandoned medicine, turned exclusively to writing poetry, and entered the

mainstream of contemporary English poets. By the end of 1816 he had met poet

and journalist Leigh Hunt, editor of the literary magazine that published his poems.

He had also met the leading romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley.

“Endymion,” written between April and November 1817 and published the

following year, is thought to be Keats's richest although most unpolished poem. In

the poem, the mortal hero Endymion's quest for the goddess Cynthia serves as a

metaphor for imaginative longing—the poet’s quest for a muse, or divine

inspiration.

Following “Endymion,” Keats struggled with his assumptions about the

power of poetry and philosophy to affect the suffering he saw in life. In June of

1818, Keats went on a physically demanding walking tour of England’s Lake

District and Scotland, perhaps in search of inspiration for an epic poem. His

journey was cut short by the illness of his brother Tom. Keats returned home and

nursed his brother through the final stages of tuberculosis. He threw himself into

writing the epic “Hyperion,” he wrote to a friend, to ease himself of Tom’s

“countenance, his voice and feebleness.'

An epic is a long narrative poem about a worthy hero, written in elevated

language; this was the principal form used by great poets before Keats. The

subject of “Hyperion” is the fall of the primeval Greek gods, who are dethroned

by the Olympians, a newer order of gods led by Apollo. Keats used this myth to

represent history as the story of how grief and misery teach humanity compassion.

The poem ends with the transformation of Apollo into the god of poetry, but Keats

left the poem unfinished. His abandonment of the poem suggests that Keats was

ready to return to a more personal theme: the growth of a poet's mind. Keats later

described the poem as showing 'false beauty proceeding from art' rather than 'the

true voice of feeling.' Tom’s death in December 1818 may have freed Keats from

the need to finish “Hyperion.”

Two other notable developments took place in Keats’s life in the latter part of

1818. First, “Endymion,” published in April, received negative reviews by the

leading literary magazines. Second, Keats fell in love with spirited, 18-year-old

Fanny Brawne. Keats's passion for Fanny Brawne is perhaps evoked in 'The Eve of St.

Agnes,' written in 1819 and published in 1820. In this narrative poem, a young man

follows an elaborate plan to woo his love and wins her heart.

Keats’s great creative outpouring came in April and May of 1819, when he

composed a group of five odes. The loose formal requirements of the ode—a

regular metrical pattern and a shift in perspective from stanza to stanza—allowed

Keats to follow his mind’s associations. Literary critics rank these works among

the greatest short poems in the English language. Each ode begins with the

speaker focusing on something—a nightingale, an urn, the goddess Psyche, the

mood of melancholy, the season of autumn—and arrives at his greater insight into

what he values.

In “Ode to a Nightingale,” the nightingale’s song symbolizes the beauty of

nature and art. Keats was fascinated by the difference between life and art: Human

beings die, but the art they make lives on. The speaker in the poem tries

repeatedly to use his imagination to go with the bird’s song, but each time he

fails to completely forget himself. In the sixth stanza he suddenly remembers what

death means, and the thought of it frightens him back to earth and his own

humanity.

In 'Ode on a Grecian Urn,' the bride and bridegroom painted on the Grecian

urn do not die. Their love can never fade, but neither can they kiss and embrace. At

the end of the poem, the speaker sees the world of art as cold rather than inviting.

The last two odes, 'Ode on Melancholy' and 'To Autumn,” show a turn in

Keats’s ideas about life and art. He celebrates “breathing human passion” as

more beautiful than either art or nature.

Keats never lived to write the poetry of 'the agonies, the strife of human

hearts' to which he aspired. Some scholars suggest that his revision of

“Hyperion,” close to the end of his life, measures what he learned about poetry.

In the revision, 'The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream,' Keats boldly makes the earlier

poem into the story of his own quest as poet. In a dream, the poem’s speaker

must pass through death to enter a temple that receives only those who cannot

forget the miseries of the world. Presiding over the shrine is Moneta, a prophetess

whose face embodies many of the opposites that had long haunted Keats’s

imagination—death and immortality, stasis and change, humankind’s goodness

and darkness. The knowledge Moneta gives him defines Keats’s new mission and

burden as a poet.

After September 1819, Keats produced little poetry. His money troubles,

always pressing, became severe. Keats and Fanny Brawne became engaged, but

with little prospect of marriage. In February 1820, Keats had a severe hemorrhage

and coughed up blood, beginning a year that he called his “posthumous

existence.” He did manage to prepare a third volume of poems for the press,

Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems.

In September 1820, Keats sailed to Italy, accompanied by a close friend. The

last months of his life there were haunted by the prospect of death and the

memory of Fanny Brawne.