Keats, Shelley , Coleridge
JOHN KEATS (1795-1821)
* He’s the forerunner of the English aestheticism. * Member of the Second generation of Romantic poets who blossomed early and died young. He is Romantic in his relish of sensation, his feeling for the Middle Ages, his love for the Greek civilization and his conception of the writer. He was able to fuse the romantic passion and the cold Neo-classicism, just as Ugo Foscolo did in “LE GRAZIE” and in “I SEPOLCRI”. * He was born in London; he attended a private school in Enfield; he attended also at the early deaths of his father (killed in a riding accident), his mother and his brother (of tuberculosis). * He became a surgeon but six years later he decided to leave the profession and announced in the sonnet “ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMAN’S HOMER” his decision to devote his life to writing verse . * His mother and brother died because of TB and his ever-frail health deteriorated rapidly following a walking tour to the Highlands (Scotland). * He fell in love with Fanny Brawne but poverty and his bad health made marriage impossible. * The symptoms of consumption became evident; in 1820 he travelled to Italy in an effort to recover his health but died in Rome of tuberculosis in 1821. He was buried in the Protestant cemetery in Rome. * There is some deeply felt personal experience behind the ODES of 1819, but the significant fact is that this experience is “behind” the odes, not their substance. * The poetical personal pronoun “I” does not stand for a human being linked to the events of his time, but for a universal one. * He remarks: “Scenery is fine, but human nature is finer” The common Romantic tendency to identify scenes and landscapes with subjective moods and emotions is rarely present in his poetry It has nothing of the Wordsworth pantheistic conviction, and no sense of mystery. * He’s a Romantic poet thanks to his belief in the supreme value of imagination.
IMAGINATION:
- the world of
* He’s the forerunner of the English aestheticism. * Member of the Second generation of Romantic poets who blossomed early and died young. He is Romantic in his relish of sensation, his feeling for the Middle Ages, his love for the Greek civilization and his conception of the writer. He was able to fuse the romantic passion and the cold Neo-classicism, just as Ugo Foscolo did in “LE GRAZIE” and in “I SEPOLCRI”. * He was born in London; he attended a private school in Enfield; he attended also at the early deaths of his father (killed in a riding accident), his mother and his brother (of tuberculosis). * He became a surgeon but six years later he decided to leave the profession and announced in the sonnet “ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMAN’S HOMER” his decision to devote his life to writing verse . * His mother and brother died because of TB and his ever-frail health deteriorated rapidly following a walking tour to the Highlands (Scotland). * He fell in love with Fanny Brawne but poverty and his bad health made marriage impossible. * The symptoms of consumption became evident; in 1820 he travelled to Italy in an effort to recover his health but died in Rome of tuberculosis in 1821. He was buried in the Protestant cemetery in Rome. * There is some deeply felt personal experience behind the ODES of 1819, but the significant fact is that this experience is “behind” the odes, not their substance. * The poetical personal pronoun “I” does not stand for a human being linked to the events of his time, but for a universal one. * He remarks: “Scenery is fine, but human nature is finer” The common Romantic tendency to identify scenes and landscapes with subjective moods and emotions is rarely present in his poetry It has nothing of the Wordsworth pantheistic conviction, and no sense of mystery. * He’s a Romantic poet thanks to his belief in the supreme value of imagination.
IMAGINATION:
- the world of