John Keats (1795-1821)

A Biography embodying the Romantic Poet in life, spirit and work:

Keats' father died when he was eight and his mother of "consumption" (tuberculosis) when he was fourteen. His brother Tom died of tuberculosis in 1818, in Keats' arms. Keats was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1819, the same year he met the love of his life: Fanny Brawne.

He died of tuberculosis at age twenty-five.

Today, we see Keats as the highly influential champion of:

The validity of imaginative experience. Note relation to Platonic Ideal or Platonic Forms: “Grecian Urn” “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

The depth and richness of his sensual imagery, concrete imagery. Note relation to imaginative experience, above; note how they work in consort: Experience and Imagination intertwined in a single poetic moment or image.

Negative Capability: “that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason…” Letters. Allowing rationally contradictory ideas and/or sensations to exist at once. As a key piece in all modern poetry, philosophy etc.    -- (over) simplified as “paradox”.  Negative capability is associated with The Sublime.  We can achieve the sublime through language only by breaking down binary (either/or, yes/no) rationality.   ...in many ways this is what we mean by "romanticism": a renewed embrace of emotional and even spiritual knowledge privileged over rational, Enlightenment knowledge.

" . . several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously--I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason…”

Letters, December 21, 27 (?), 1817

Key “Negative Capability” Themes:  love/death; dreaming/waking; imagination/reality; the ideal/experience; immortal/mortal (enduring art or soul/transient passion); innocence/experience.

Romantic Sensibility: Love and death as joined. Blessed innocence joined with sensual experience.  The influence on these continue in the pop mythology and iconography of Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain etc. or pulp like Titanic, Ghost etc.

Neo-Classical Topics without the confining Neo-Classical constraints of Reason/Rationality: Strong control of ancient and Greco-Roman themes and contexts but imbued with a Humanistic and Romantic sensibility.  In this sense Keats' work is as much Shakespearean as Wordsworthian.

On Love and Impending Death:

To Fanny Brawne: ". . .I love you; all I can bring you is a swooning admiration of your Beauty. . . . You absorb me in spite of myself--you alone: for I look not forward with any pleasure to what is call'd being settled in the world; I tremble at domestic cares--yet for you I would meet them, though if it would leave you the happier I would rather die than do so. I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your Loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute. I hate the world: it batters too much the wings of my self-will, and would I could take a sweet poison from your lips to send me out of it. From no others would I take it. … I will imagine you Venus tonight and pray, pray, pray to your star like a Hethen."

May 3, 1818

On Experience, the Necessity of Suffering and The Soul:

"--The common cognomen [surname] of this world among the misguided and superstitious is 'a vale of tears' from which we are to be redeemed by a certain arbitrary interposition of God and taken to Heaven--What a little circumscribed straightened notion! call the world if you Please 'The vale of Soul-making' Then you will find out the use of the world (I am speaking now in the highest terms for human nature admitting it to be immortal which I will here take for granted for the purpose of showing a thought which has struck me concerning it) I say "Soul making" Soul as distinguished from an Intelligence-- There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions--but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself. Intelligences are atoms of perception--they know and they see and they are pure, in short they are God--how then are Souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are God to have identity given them--so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each ones individual existence? How, but by the medium of a world like this? This point I sincerely wish to consider because I think it a grander system of salvation than the chrystain religion--or rather it is a system of Spirit-creation--This is effected by three grand materials acting the one upon the other for a series of years--These Materials are the Intelligence--the human heart (as distinguished from intelligence or Mind) and the World or Elemental space suited for the proper action of Mind and Heart on each other for the purpose of forming the Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity. I can scarcely express what I but dimly perceive--and yet I think I perceive it--that you may judge the more clearly I will put it in the most homely form possible--I will call the world a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read--I will call the Child able to read, the Soul made from that school and its hornbook. Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways! Not merely is the Heart a Hornbook, it is the Minds Bible, it is the Minds experience, it is the teat from which the Mind or intelligence sucks its identity--As various as the Lives of Men are--so various become their Souls, and thus does God make individual beings, Souls, Identical Souls of the sparks of his own essence--"

April 21, 1810

http://englishhistory.net/keats/letters.html

Sketch of the dying Keats, by Joseph Severn, (Keats-Shelley Museum)

"Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water."
Note the Greek lyre with four of its eight strings missing.  Percy Shelley is buried beside him.