John Keats by all counts had a life riddled with sadness. His father died when he was young, and his mother left his life for a period after his death. Then when she reappeared, she was in poor health and died soon after. Not too long after that, his brother passed away as well. Keats struggled with money for most of his life. Despite being in good health, Keats was overwhelmed by the feeling that he too was destined for an early death. He ended up being right, and died at age 25. There was a period of time where Keats was crushed by critics and he was described by Percy Shelley as “a pale flower” in Adonais. Keats is renowned for being an escapist poet, meaning he uses his poetry to escape from his bitter reality into an imaginative world, but he is forever cognizant of the fact that the reality that plagues him is unavoidable and not fully worth avoiding. Keats is tormented by the disconnection between the ideal and the actual, never truly being able to achieve happiness.
Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale is a perfect example of this escapism. In the third stanza, the speaker is describing to the nightingale the bitter world that it does not know of. The nightingale “has never known // the weariness, the fever, and the fret // here, where men sit and hear each other groan; // where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, //where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; // where but to think is to be full of sorrow // and leaden-eyed despairs” (Keats 23-28). Here, Keats is echoing the harsh reality that has been his life and what he sees as all life. Keats’ view of life is one full of misery, pain, struggle, and death. He writes of men getting old and losing control over their hands, groaning and complaining. He also writes o...
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...missing the richness and diversity of life.
So John Keats is an escapist because he seeks escape from reality. However, he is never truly able to escape. No matter how deep he buries himself in poetry or art, it gives only momentary respite before he is shot back to reality and reminded of the limitations of being lost in a stationary scene. He is an escapist that never truly escapes, tied down to the very thing he tries to escape from. Keats is doomed to be unhappy, for the kind of life that would satisfy his mind is impossible.
Works Cited
Keats, John. "Ode on a Grecian Urn." The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. 9th ed. Vol. D. N.p.: W.W. Norton &, 2012. 930-31. Print.
Keats, John. "Ode to a Nightingale." The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. 9th ed. Vol. D. N.p.: W.W. Norton &, 2012. 927-29. Print.
The text from A Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie, both written by the renowned author Tennessee Williams, deal with the topics of life's pressures, and the desire to succeed in everything we do. Oftentimes, people place unrealistic expectations upon us and set the bar higher than we can achieve, or even want to reach. People end up developing mechanisms to deal with these stressors and tensions that have been created. We find other unhealthy habits and vices to supplant the reality we are trying to escape, that hopefully will take away this pain and suffering we are experiencing. In both of these plays, the characters are not able to live in their present realities. Two of the main characters are closely linked in their characterizations
Keats’ poetry explores many issues and themes, accompanied by language and technique that clearly demonstrates the romantic era. His poems ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and ‘Bright Star’ examine themes such as mortality and idealism of love. Mortality were common themes that were presented in these poems as Keats’ has used his imagination in order to touch each of the five senses. He also explores the idea that the nightingale’s song allows Keats to travel in a world of beauty. Keats draws from mythology and christianity to further develop these ideas. Keats’ wrote ‘Ode To A Nightingale’ as an immortal bird’s song that enabled him to escape reality and live only to admire the beauty of nature around him. ‘Bright Star’ also discusses the immortal as Keats shows a sense of yearning to be like a star in it’s steadfast abilities. The visual representation reveal these ideas as each image reflects Keats’ obsession with nature and how through this mindset he was able
McKusick, James C. "The Return of the Nightingale." The Wordsworth Circle 38 (Winter/ Spring 2007): 34-38.
So for the most the imagery was used really well. It seems to be a common trait and regularity in Keats poems. He always paints a vivid imagine in the readers head that really can clear up any confusion that the reader may have. The urn was the key component of this poem because since there is no time so loves last forever and that is the thing that John ultimately wants. Which also seems to be the regular in his
John Keats’s illness caused him to write about his unfulfillment as a writer. In an analysis of Keats’s works, Cody Brotter states that Keats’s poems are “conscious of itself as the poem[s] of a poet.” The poems are written in the context of Keats tragically short and painful life. In his ...
Life is a beautiful thing that should not be wasted. Life must be lived without warning; it is not to be taken for granted. We will never fully understand life, not even in a million years. The theme of John Keats' "To Autumn" is to enjoy life, even as you grow old and it begins to move away from you. He spreads his message through the time frame, imagery, and diction of the stanzas.
Baron, forlorn in the loss of his Madeline. Does Keats merely make tribute to this classic idea of
Imagery and symbolism merged to express his imagination, he became a unique poet in an evolving world where Romanticism was quickly expanding globally, not into a movement, but a way of thinking. Keats’ mother and brother, and eventually he too, passed away of tuberculosis. At the time of his brother 's passing, he developed ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’. ‘La Belle’ expressed Keats’ intellect and creativity, although at the same time he himself expressed his angst and depression for the loss of his brother. His poem ‘Bright Star’ was written in a part of his life in which a woman had influenced Keats’ greatly, so much in fact that he was driven to write ‘Bright Star’ in appreciation and celebration of the love of his life. These poems reflect Keats’ intellect, originality, creativity, and his ability to merge the contextual aspects of his life and his imagination with the ideals and concepts of Romanticism to create powerful
Throughout Keats’s work, there are clear connections between the effect of the senses on emotion. Keats tends to apply synesthetic to his analogies with the interactions with man and the world to create different views and understandings. By doing this, Keats can arouse different emotions to the work by which he intends for the reader to determine on their own, based on how they perceive it. This is most notable in Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale, for example, “Tasting of Flora, and Country Green” (827). Keats accentuates emotion also through his relationship with poetry, and death.
middle of paper ... ... He forgets about the impossible, and being immortal and being alone, but rather embraces the temporary and exhilarating. Keats presents his feelings on how he no longer wishes for impossible goals, and how it is much more preferable to enjoy life as much as possible. It is of no use longing for things we cannot have, and so we must learn to live with the myriad of things we already have, of which one in particular appeals to Keats: the warmth of human companionship and the passion of love.
Arguably one of John Keats’ most famous poems, “Ode to a nightingale” in and of itself is an allegory on the frail, conflicting aspects of life while also standing as a commentary on the want to escape life’s problems and the unavoidability of death. Keats’ poem utilizes a heavy amount of symbolism, simile and allusion to idealize nature as a perfect, almost mystical, world that holds no problems while using imagery taken from nature, combined with alliteration and assonance, to idealize the dream of escape from the problems life often presents; more specifically, aging and our inevitable deaths by allowing the reader to feel as if they are experiencing the speaker’s experience listening to the nightingale.
It's a pretty bleak picture he paints, cloaked in finery and delight but at the core full of stoic acceptance of misery, hardship and death. While there is a good deal of this that Kipling probably believed, even a casual examination of his own life suggests that this book is more of a bare-bones explication of the fundamental issues than a fully fleshed out portrait of how an artist ought to live.
Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Philosophy of Composition," The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe, vol. II, 1850, pp. 259-270.
“An Analysis of John Keats' Odes: "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on Melancholy" - RealStudyGuides.net." RealStudyGuides.net. N.p., n.d. Web. 01 Mar. 2014.
To begin, When You Are Old by William Butler Yeats discusses the idea of change in life. In this poem Yeats is a bitter man angry about the way his woman would not marry him. He goes to say some harsh things in a lovey way and tends to get his point across. His poem begins by saying on page 1140 lines 1-2, “When you are old and gray and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book,” Here Yeats disc...