1、John Keats (1795-1821),1. Life and Career Born in London, the son of a livery-stable owner Educated at the Clarkes School where his first inclination toward poetry was initiated His father died when he was nine and his mother died when he was fifteen. Apprenticed to a surgeon and apothecary and stud

2、ied medicine at Guys Hospital in London,John Keats,Became a licensed apothecary in 1816, but turned to devote himself to poetry Published his first important poem “On First Looking into Chapmans Homer” in 1816 in Hunts paper, the Examiner The reviewers of Blackwoods Magazine, the Quarterly Review an

3、d 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 chemists,John Keats,Griefs and troubles crowded in upon him: his dearly loved brother, Tom, died; he was in trouble about money; he became ill wit

4、h tuberculosis; he fell in love but 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. The third and best of h

5、is volumes of poetry, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, was published in 1820. Keats went to Rome to seek a warm climate for the winter in the fall of 1820 He died there on February 23, 1821, and was buried in the Protestant cemetery.,Keatss grave in Rome,2. Points of View Keat

6、s is a moderate radical, has great sympathy for the poor. He believes that poetry is a release from misery, a vehicle to paradise. The mission of poetry is to work for the welfare of the people. The message carried in his poetry is the lasting power of beauty and its union with truth.,3. Major Works

7、 “On First Looking into Chapmans Homer” (1816) Endymion (1817) Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820) The Fall of Hyperion,Odes,Ode on Indolence Ode to Psyche Ode to a Nightingale Ode on a Grecian Urn Ode on Melancholy To Autumn,4. Special Features The mythic world of the anci

8、ent Greece and the English poetry of the Renaissance period provide Keats with the most important imaginative resources. His realization of the empathic power of the imagination is of the greatest consequence to his work and is a faculty which leads him to his most profound insights.,His poetry is c

9、haracterized by: exact and closely knit construction, sensual descriptions, and the force of imagination, His poetry gives transcendental values to the physical beauty of the world.,5. “On First Looking into Chapmans Homer” Keats was so moved by the power and aliveness of Chapmans translation of Hom

10、er that he wrote this sonnet-after spending all night reading Homer with a friend. The poem expresses the intensity of Keatss experience; it also reveals how passionately he cared about poetry.,Homer,As a Petrarchan or Italian sonnet, On First Looking into Chapmans Homer falls into two partsan octet

11、 (eight lines) and a sestet (six lines). The octet describes Keatss reading experience before reading Chapmans translation and the sestet contrasts his experience of reading it.,“Ode to a Nightingale”,Nightingale,6. “Ode to a Nightingale” Stanza 1 begins with the poets expression of a feeling of dul

12、lness. The poet feels as if drugged by the full-throated east of the birds song. In stanza 2, the poet calls for a drink of wine, creating images of the warm south of France, where wines are made. He gives a detailed description of how the wine looks as one drinks it. Wine, he says, might allow him

13、to escape from the world into the dim forest realm of the nightingale.,Stanza 3 describes the world from which Keat longs to escape, a world full of sickness and sorrow. He alludes to his brothers death: youth grows pale, and spectra-thin, and dies. Stanza 4 begins with the cry Away! Keats rejects w

14、ine and prefers to travel by means of the imagination on the wings of Poesy. He imagines that he is already with the nightingale in the dark sky.,In stanza 5, the poet, in embalmed darkness, lets his imagination tell what flowers surround him. He feels isolated from the grief of the world. In stanza

15、 6, the feeling of being embalmed becomes a wish for death. The poet has longed for death before. This seems to be the perfect moment to die, while the nightingale is singing. But, having reached this point, the poet realizes that, once dead, he could no longer hear the birds song. He would be merel

16、y a sod, a clump of earth without feelings.,In stanza 7, Keats turns back to the idea of life. The nightingale seems to live eternally because its song is the same now as it was in ancient days. Perhaps the biblical Ruth, for example, heard the nightingales song as she gathered grain in the fields.

17、In stanza 8, as the nightingales song fades in the distance, Keats again becomes aware of his own situation. The imaginative escape is over, he evaluates what has happened, asking, Was it a vision, or a waking dream?,The ode re-enacts the emotional experience of a flight of imagination. The poet lon

18、ged for escape, rejecting drugs and wine in favor of the combined effect of the nightingales song and his own imagination. He reached a point of longing for oblivion and then turned back. He ends by pondering the nature of his own flight.,A major concern in Ode to a Nightingale is Keatss perception

19、of the conflicted nature of human life, i.e., the interconnection or mixture of pain/joy, intensity of feeling/ numbness of feeling, life/death, mortal/ immortal, the actual/the ideal, and separation/connection.,Keats describes an out-of-body experience, or a near-death experience. A typical OBE begins when sensory input is disrupted, sometimes by drugs. The mind then feels itself float upwards out of the body to a height that has been termed birds-eye or tree-high. Experiencing itself being divided into two, or having a dissociated dou