John Keats p.878

1. John Keats p.878 A thing of beauty is a joy forever: its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness. John Keats The poetry of Keats is characterized by sensual imagery, most notably in the series of odes. Today his poems and letters are some of the most popular and most analyzed in English literature.

2. Here lies one whose name was writ in water- John Keats • “When I Have Fears” • *Realization of his death* • When I have fears that I may cease to be • Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain, • Before high piled books, in charact’ry, • Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain; • When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face, • Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, • And think that I may never live to trace • Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance; • And when I feel, fair creature of an hour! • That I shall never look upon thee more, • Never have relish in the faery power • Of unreflecting love!—then on the shore • Of the wide world I stand alone, and think • Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

3. Written in 1819, 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' was the third of the five 'great odes' of 1819, which are generally believed to have been written in the following order - Psyche, Nightingale, Grecian Urn, Melancholy, and Autumn. Of the five, Grecian Urn and Melancholy are merely dated '1819'. Critics have used vague references in Keats's letters as well as thematic progression to assign order. ('Ode on Indolence', though written in March 1819, perhaps before Grecian Urn, is not considered one of the 'great odes'.) This ode contains the most discussed two lines in all of Keats's poetry - '"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.' The exact meaning of those lines is disputed by everyone; no less a critic than TS Eliot considered them a blight upon an otherwise beautiful poem. Scholars have been unable to agree to whom the last thirteen lines of the poem are addressed. Arguments can be made for any of the four most obvious possibilities, -poet to reader, urn to reader, poet to urn, poet to figures on the urn. The issue is further confused by the change in quotation marks between the original manuscript copy of the ode and the 1820 published edition.

4. The Victorians (p.914) While in the preceding Romantic period poetry had been the dominant genre, it was the novel that was most important in the Victorian period. Charles Dickens (1812-1870) dominated the first part of Victoria's reign: his first novel, Pickwick Papers, was published in 1836, and his last Our Mutual Friend between 1864-5. William Thackeray's (1811-1863) most famous work Vanity Fair appeared in 1848, and the three Brontë sisters, Charlotte (1816–55), Emily (1818–48) and Anne (1820–49), also published significant works in the 1840s. Robert Browning (1812–89) and Alfred Tennyson (1809–92) were Victorian England's most famous poets, though more recent taste has tended to prefer the poetry of Thomas Hardy, who, though he wrote poetry throughout his life, did not publish a collection until 1898, as well of that of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89), whose poetry was published posthumously in 1918. Early poetry of W. B. Yeats was also published in Victoria's reign.

6. Quotable Tennyson • “Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control; these three alone lead one to sovereign power.” • “'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” • “I am a part of all that I have met.” • “No man ever got very high by pulling other people down. The intelligent merchant does not knock his competitors. The sensible worker does not work those who work with him. Don't knock your friends. Don't knock your enemies. Don't knock yourself.”

7. The Lady of Shalott • Modern critics consider "The Lady of Shalott" to be representative of the dilemma that faces artists, writers, and musicians: to create work about and celebrate the world, or to enjoy the world by simply living in it. Feminist critic see the poem as concerned with issues of women's sexuality and their place in the Victorian world. The fact that the poem works through such complex and polyvalent symbolismindicates an important difference between Tennyson's work and his Arthurian source material. While Tennyson's sources tended to work through allegory, Tennyson himself did not

9. Looking at Lancelot

10. Critics such as Hatfield have suggested that The Lady of Shalott is a representation of how Tennyson viewed society; the distance at which other people are in the lady's eyes is symbolic of the distance he feels from society. The fact that she only sees them through a window pane is significant of the way in which Shalott and Tennyson see the world—in a filtered sense. This distance is therefore linked to the artistic licence Tennyson often wrote about

11. Robert Browning • In his introduction to the Oxford University Press edition of Browning's poems 1833-1864[19] Ian Jack comments that Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot "all learned from Browning's exploration of the exploration of the possibilities of dramatic poetry and of colloquial idiom"