John Keats (Start here for final)

Question 1

1795

Answer 1

born in london to a head stableman and mother (both pass away by the time he was 15)

Question 2

1810

Answer 2

begins apprenticeship to Thomas Hammond: surgeon and apothecary

Question 3

1815

Answer 3

studies at Guy’s Hospital, London, and qualifies to practice as an apothecary-surgeon

Question 4

1816

Answer 4

abandons medical career to write poetry
- drafts “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”

Question 5

1817

Answer 5

composes Endymion: an epic poem modeled upon John Milton

Question 6

1818

Answer 6

negative reviews send Keats into despair and depression
- takes brother Tom on a months long walking tour of the Lake District, Ireland, and Scotland to stave off tuberculosis

Question 7

1820

Answer 7

moves to rome to convalesce after coughing up blood

Question 8

1821

Answer 8

passes away in rome and is buried in protestant cemetery near Shelleys’ children

Question 9

“The Authenticity of the Imagination”

Question 10

The autonomy of the imagination:

Answer 10

I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the
Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—
What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be
truth —whether it existed before or not—for I have
the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they
are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty
—In a Word, you may know my favorite
Speculation by my first Book and the little song I
sent in my last—which is a representation from the
fancy of the probable mode of operating in these
Matters—The Imagination may be compared to
Adam’s dream —he awoke and found it truth.

• something about possibility, imagination in dreams can make it real
• like Kubla Khan: autonomy of the imagination can triumph over the world
• beauty and truth keeps idea of imagination
  
  • what is the relationship b/twn human and beauty
  • liberty is beautiful
  • poetry allows you to channel relationship

Question 11

The philosophic mind

Answer 11

But as I was saying— the simple imaginative Mind
may have its rewards in the repeti[ti]on of its own
silent Working coming continually on the spirit with
a fine suddenness— to compare great things with
small—have you never by being surprised with an
old Melody—in a delicious place—by a delicious
voice, fe[l]t over again your very speculations and
surmises at the time it first operated on your soul—
do you not remember forming to yourself the
singer’s face more beautiful [than] it was possible
and yet with the elevation of the Moment you did
not think so—even then you were mounted on the
Wings of Imagination so high— that the Prototype
must be here after—that delicious face you will see
—What a time!

I am continually running away from the subject—
sure this cannot be exactly the case with a
complex Mind—one that is imaginative and at the
same time careful of its fruits—who would exist
partly on sensation partly on thought—to whom it
is necessary that years should bring the
philosophic Mind —such an one I consider your’s
and therefore it is necessary to your eternal
Happiness that you not only drink this old Wine of
Heaven which I shall call the redigestion of our
most ethereal Musings on Earth; but also increase
in knowledge and know all things.

Question 12

Analysis

Answer 12

• comparing great things w/ the small
• “drinking old wine of heaven”
• his poems about juxtapositions
  
  • treats imagination by comparing, how he holds these things and reinvents
• Keats: imagination can hold two unlike things together => merging together
• ability to compare => how knowledge is accessed
  
  • think synthetically and merge things together instead of keeping them apart

Question 13

“Negative Capability”

Question 14

Shakespeare’s negative capability

Answer 14

at once it struck me, what quality went to form a
Man of Achievement especially in Literature &
which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I
mean Negative Capability, that is when man is
capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries,
doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact &
reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a
fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the
Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of
remaining content with half knowledge. This
pursued through Volumes would perhaps take us
no further than this, that with a great poet the
sense of Beauty overcomes every other
consideration, or rather obliterates all
consideration.

Question 15

analysis

Answer 15

• something about beauty being intuitive
• ex: seeing beautiful painting/in the presence of something beautiful
  
  • feels lighter on the inside => a kind of freedom/lightness
  • beauty is all consuming
  • you don’t have a choice to feel => beautiful is acting upon you => can’t feel, can’t mediate or control how you respond
• “negative capability” = man is capable of being un uncertainties, doubts
  
  • beauty intersects and undercuts reason
• Shakespeare possess ability to be in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts etc. => can abandon fact and reason
• tension between beauty and consideration
• coleridge isn’t happy w/ half knowledge
• superficial poet => latches onto facts and reasons

Question 16

“On first looking into Chapman’s homer”

Answer 16

translation of Homer by George Chapman

Question 17

passage:

Answer 17

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Question 18

analysis

Answer 18

• classical greek world of antiquity
• “much have travelled” => by reading Homer’s descriptions of mythological worlds, able to travel
• felt like an astronomer looking up or Cortez looking out onto the pacific from NA
• gives imperial expanse or viewpoint into uncharted world

Question 19

Volta

Answer 19

• italian word for “turn”
  
  • concept of idea in a poem that gets flipped
  • ex: what you see in first 8 lines is one idea
• a shift in a sonnet (typically b/twn the octave and sestet) in which a topic is reassessed
• “The felt I” is where the turn happens

Question 20

“On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again”

Question 21

passage:

Answer 21

O golden-tongued Romance with serene lute!
Fair plumed Syren! Queen of far away!
Leave melodizing on this wintry day,
Shut up thine olden pages, and be mute:
Adieu! for once again the fierce dispute,
Betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay
Must I burn through; once more humbly assay
The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearian fruit.
Chief Poet! and ye clouds of Albion,
Begetters of our deep eternal theme,
When through the old oak forest I am gone,
Let me not wander in a barren dream,
But when I am consumed in the fire,
Give me new Phoenix wings to fly at my desire

Question 22

analysis

Answer 22

• “once again” = read it before and he’s reading it again w/ knowledge of what happened
• golden age of England (Albion) => ethereal, medieval romance
  
  • looking to Shakespeare as Homer of England
  • a begetter
  • then goes to Keat’s mortality (phoenix)
• texts, literature survives and persist in the world => Phoenix’s wings
• relationship to King Lear or Shakespeare?
  
  • love-hate relationship => keeps going back to it
    
    • a distraction => siren
  • anxiety of influence
    
    • Shakespeare is chief poet, wishing he’s as talented => not measuring up
    • kind of “usurp” authority and be as talented as Shakespeare
    • transcend ability to think rationally (Shakespeare)
• poetry helps map the unknown, understand the world
• from Shakespeare’s longevity to Keats’ own death

Question 23

“chapman’s homer” & “King lear”

Answer 23

• both sonnets bear witness to Keats’ self-fashioning as a romantic poet
• descended from a tradition that includes Homer and Shakespeare: both apart of and distinct from them
• poetry as a form of travel and transport (like Kubla Khan, Mont Blank, and The Prelude)

Question 24

Ekphrasis

Answer 24

• verbal description of a visual work of art
• narrates the dramatic activity of a work of art using speech/language
• common classical (homer) and neoclassical (Alexander pope, Phillis Wheatley Peters) tradition => demonstrates a writer’s fluency in different cultural legacies

Question 25

“On seeing the elgin marbles”

Question 26

passage:

Answer 26

My spirit is too weak—mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagined pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.
Yet ’tis a gentle luxury to weep
That I have not the cloudy winds to keep
Fresh for the opening of the morning’s eye.
Such dim-conceived glories of the brain
Bring round the heart an undescribable feud;
So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,
That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
Wasting of old time—with a billowy main—
A sun—a shadow of a magnitude.

Question 27

analysis

Answer 27

• Keats profess knowledge of Greek history
• title alerts us that he’s seeing Elgin Marbles
• something about poetry and mortality, melancholy, and passing time
• inspires historical consciousness
• what comes to mind thinking of classical Greece?
  
  • tragedy, architecture, origin of democracy
• renaissance = art (return to classical value)
• Greek is the ideal cultural moment you want
• be aware that all empires crumble => pre-course to height of empire and look at past as humbling mortality
• poetry is something that endures => text themselves remain while the writer is gone

Question 28

more on “Elgin Marbles”

Answer 28

• originally from Parthenon and Acropolis in Greece
• brought to England in 1806
• Keats first sees the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum in 1817
• relationship b/twn culture and empire
• how cultural artifacts circulate the world

Question 29

Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias”

Answer 29

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Question 30

analysis

Answer 30

• King fr. ancient egypt
• “nothing on the side remains”
  
  • all going to crumble at some point => fragility and mortality to empire/politics
• “colossal wreck” => grasp feelings of morality
  
  • sculpture to man who’s gone a long time
• these art stay w/ time but also bear witness to history

Question 31

more on Ozymandias

Answer 31

• melancholy as historical consciousness
• romanticism as anachronistic => “Rime of Ancient Mariner,” “On seeing the Elgin Marbles”
• London as the new athens, England as the new Greece
• empire and prosperity, empire and decay
  
  • never been once consistent => always changes

Question 32

“Ode on a Grecian Urn”

Question 33

passage

Answer 33

Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Question 34

analysis

Answer 34

• direct reference to urn itself
  
  • urn is pristine = “unravished” (leave with it) also sexual connotations (seduced, also taken advantage of)
  • art is like a virgin
    
    • sexual merging b/twn bride and male poet writer (feminized silent art and male verbal art)
• different type of progression in poetry => consuming visual media instead of physical media (art vs. sculpture)
• “our rhyme” = sculpture has more advantage over poetry (better at storytelling)
  
  • Arcady = Arcadia
• relationship to urn is questioning => provokes more than it answers questions
  
  • has curiosity of who people are on the urn
• loitering, not being productive
  
  • Arcadia => place where people enjoy themselves, relax

Question 35

Grecian urn

Answer 35

• as pastoral: the bucolic fantasy of a bygone era preserved (fossilized?) in art
  
  • poetry preserves experience
• speaker’s questions at the end of the first stanza

Question 36

2nd stanza

Answer 36

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Question 37

analysis

Answer 37

• uses negative to describe
  
  • bodies will age, and change on urn => but work doesn’t
• every line has opposition => “Not to,” “no tone,” “nor ever can”
• negative capability in the silence of art
  
  • Grecian Urn remains silent and mute compared to Keat’s verbal poetry
• poetry as the upper hand => temporal progression of time
• there is labor but creative labor, imaginative => gives art the upper hand

Question 38

3rd stanza

Answer 38

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue

Question 39

analysis

Answer 39

• everything frozen in time => like a photograph
  
  • how something is at a given amount of time
• Keats inverts => the negatives becomes a good thing
• extreme of emotion => art if a way to preserve it, crystalize being forever young “happy happy love”

Question 40

different temporalities of “Grecian Urn”

Answer 40

• aesthetic time (which is depicted on the urn)
• lyric time (which is depicted in the poem)
  
  • how poetry progresses in time & choosing what poem represents
• historical time (which separates the urn from the 19th c. and also the poem’s time from our own)
  
  • what he’s thinking about/grabbling at
  • 3rd stanza: talks about being forever young, Greece doesn’t know empire will collapse in the future

Question 41

final stanza

Answer 41

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.

Question 42

analysis

Answer 42

• urn talking out loud: “Beauty is truth, truth is beauty”
  
  • both are identical to each other
  • sculpture teaches us a lesson => theme, moral, message

Question 43

paragone

Answer 43

• a literary competition b/twn different media, typically b/twn visuals (painting, sculpture) and verbal (poetry, prose) art
• “Ut pictura poesis” - “As is painting, so is poetry” (Horace)
• 18th c. aesthetic philosophy (Lessing, Burke, Kant) esplores the affinities and tensions b/twn the “sister arts” of painting and poetry
  
  • Keats puts words into urn => poetry has upper hand over visual art

Question 44

birds

Answer 44

• like the wind, birds are a key motif in British romanticism => ;ends itself into thinking about beauty
• associated w/ creativity, ephemerality, flight, fancy, and freedom
  
  • icon of mobility => cross geographical boundaries (complete freedom)

Question 45

“Ode to a Nightingale”

Question 46

passage

Answer 46

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

Question 47

analysis

Answer 47

what does he observe about the nightingale?
- animals more natural than humans => more intimate w/ nature
- song to Norton Anthology (line 14) => bird as an artist
- province = freedom
- associated w/ faraway places like France
- bird associated w/ good things: dance, song emotions

Question 48

passage

Answer 48

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast 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,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow

Question 49

analysis

Answer 49

• world of humans comprised of melancholy, despairs
  
  • life is miserable - “Toil and trouble”
  • aging (fading, death)
• beauty and despair tied together
• animals don’t have melancholy and despair like humans do
• beauty is fleeing => most of life is not beautiful
  
  • human life is about full of sorrow, painting, etc.
  • about the ignorance of passing of time
• beauty is “rare” = more melancholic

Question 50

passage

Answer 50

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy
ways.

Question 51

analysis

Answer 51

• beauty is almost incompatible w/ human world
• beauty is a rational, beautiful side of things => sobering
• birds can take us to the realm of the beautiful
• imagining a supernatural world

Question 52

passage

Answer 52

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now ‘tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?

Question 53

analysis

Answer 53

• skepticism & uncertainty of beauty
  
  • is it a dream?
  • is beauty incompatible w/ our everyday world
• to romantic poet: once you’ve tasted beauty, weird to return back to world without it
• beauty & melancholy shape each other => inspire emotion and realize how fleeting it is
• hunger for beauty b/c we never have it

Question 54

beauty

Answer 54

• as ephemeral and short lived
• transient, fleeting quality of something that makes it all the more rare and therefore valuable

Question 55

“Ode on Melancholy”

Question 56

passage

Answer 56

No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss’d
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow’s mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul

Question 57

analysis

Answer 57

• negation about melancholy as the refusal of certain things
• “Proserpine” = Persephone
  
  • seduced by Hades & spend 6 months in underworld
  • b/c she’s associated w/ light => spend winter under
  • metaphor w/ persephone to time (wait for harvest to come)
  • mythology as a metaphor for changing of season/time
• melancholy is a part of life but not the only characteristic => not forever
• go to underworld => forget who you are as a human (washing away the past)
• almost enjoying melancholy
  
  • short lived emotional state

Question 58

passage

Answer 58

But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

Question 59

analysis

Answer 59

• just because you can’t see it, doesn’t mean it’s not there “green hill in April shroud”
  
  • inevitable return
• “glut thy sorrow on a morning rose”
  
  • overindulge/satiate our sorrow
  • teaching us to enjoy our melancholy

Question 60

passage

Answer 60

She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous
tongue
Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;
His soul shalt taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung

Question 61

analysis

Answer 61

• beauty, melancholy, delight as complementary forces of each other
  
  • can’t have one without the other
  • beauty & melancholy bound in some way => symbiotic relationship

Question 62

“To Autumn”

Question 63

passage

Answer 63

season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Question 64

analysis

Answer 64

• what it means to embrace melancholy => define beauty in autumnal change
  
  • human emotions is mirroring natural world
• summer “o’ver brimm’d”
  
  • winter: return to emotional contentness

Question 65

passage

Answer 65

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Question 66

analysis

Answer 66

• autumn is a time of rest
• surrendering to melancholy & trusting it will end
  
  • beauty & melancholy is reciprocal

Question 67

passage

Answer 67

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Question 68

analysis

Answer 68

• species of animals continuing => keep expressing music and creating
• melancholy and beauty teach us to wait and new things are around the corner