Keats Flashcards
Often characterised as the a creator of…
“silken phrase & silver tongue”
Negative capability - from letter to his brothers December 1817
“when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason ”
Surgeon at Guy’s hospital
Human dissection - the young apprentices carved ‘limbs and bodies, in all stages of putrefaction, and of all colours’ (William Osler)
When was the important letter to Benjamin Bailey written
22 Nov 1817
The ‘Camelion Poet’ - letter to Richard Woodhouse 27 October 1818
‘A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity - he is continually in for - an filling some other Body’.
Keats against ‘egotistical sublime’ - letter to Reynolds 2 February 1818
‘Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject’.
Egotistical sublime
‘for the sake of a few fine imaginative or domestic passages… are we to be bullied into a certain Philosophy engendered in the whims of an Egotist.’
1848 review in the New Monthly Magazine summing up critical responses of Keats’ contemporaries to his work:
‘It was the misfortune of Keats as a poet, to be either extravagantly praised or unmercifully condemned.’
Which reviewer, review and magazine ridiculed Keats’, dismissed Endymion as ‘drivelling idiocy, and recommended overambitious ‘Johnny Keats’ return to pills and plasters.
John Gibson Lockhart’s 1818 review of ‘Endymion and Poems (1817) in ‘Blackwood’s Magazine’.
Shelley’s preface in ‘Adonais’ offered counter-attack to reviewers:
‘The savage criticism on his ‘Endymion’, which appeared in the ‘Quarterly Review’, produced the most violent effect on his susceptible mind.’
What quote sums up the myth of Keats as a helpless victim destroyed by critics?
Byron in ‘Don Juan’ ‘snuff’d out by an article’.
What did Walter Pater view him as?
The forerunner of the art for art’s sake movement.
What was Paul de Man’s introductory remark to his ‘Selected Poetry of John Keats’ which confirmed Keats’ literariness?
‘In reading Keats’ we are ‘reading the work of a man whose experience is mainly literary.’
What is an example of New Critic reading of Keats?
Cleanth Brook’s analysis of verbal and structural effects of ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’.
Who was instrumental in demonstrating Keats’ poetry could be interpreted using historicist methodologies?
Jerome McGann in ‘Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism’.
