Keats
Keats “If poetry come not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.” Negative capability: Keats believed that great people, especially poets, have to the ability to accept that not everything can be resolved. The truths found in the imagination access holy authority and cannot be otherwise understood. John Keats
claimed that great artists possessed what he called “Negative Capability.” Such artists were “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Explain how Keats’ concept of “negative capability” might be applied to a reading of Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”
Keats doesn’t focus on the same subjects as the other romantic poets, like religion, ethics, morals or politics. He writes about sensations and experiencing the richness of life. Conflicts in Keats’ poetry Transient sensation/enduring art Dream/reality Joy/melancholoy Ideal/real Mortal/immortal Life/death Separation/connection Being immersed in passion/desiring to escape passion A lyric poem is a short poem with one speaker, not necessarily the poet, who expresses thought and feeling. A lyric poem stresses moments of feeling and seeks to make an impact in a brief period of time (kind of like a 3 minute song or a 15 second commercial) Ode: usually a lyric poem of moderate length, with a serious subject, elevated style, and elaborate stanza pattern. Often the Romantic poets start the ode with a meditation on something in nature, like Keats in “Ode to a Nightingale” or Shelly in “Ode to the West Wind.” The ode has three parts in the Romantic era: 1. The description of a particularized outer natural scene; 2. An extended meditation, which the scene stimulates and which may be focused on a private problem or a universal situation or both
3. The occurrence of an insight or vision, a resolution or decision, which signals a return to the scene originally described, but with a new perspective created by the intervening
claimed that great artists possessed what he called “Negative Capability.” Such artists were “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Explain how Keats’ concept of “negative capability” might be applied to a reading of Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”
Keats doesn’t focus on the same subjects as the other romantic poets, like religion, ethics, morals or politics. He writes about sensations and experiencing the richness of life. Conflicts in Keats’ poetry Transient sensation/enduring art Dream/reality Joy/melancholoy Ideal/real Mortal/immortal Life/death Separation/connection Being immersed in passion/desiring to escape passion A lyric poem is a short poem with one speaker, not necessarily the poet, who expresses thought and feeling. A lyric poem stresses moments of feeling and seeks to make an impact in a brief period of time (kind of like a 3 minute song or a 15 second commercial) Ode: usually a lyric poem of moderate length, with a serious subject, elevated style, and elaborate stanza pattern. Often the Romantic poets start the ode with a meditation on something in nature, like Keats in “Ode to a Nightingale” or Shelly in “Ode to the West Wind.” The ode has three parts in the Romantic era: 1. The description of a particularized outer natural scene; 2. An extended meditation, which the scene stimulates and which may be focused on a private problem or a universal situation or both
3. The occurrence of an insight or vision, a resolution or decision, which signals a return to the scene originally described, but with a new perspective created by the intervening