Keats

Question 1

Keats Background

Answer 1

• never went to university
• middle class London background
• good education at Enfield
• Leigh Hunt, first poetic hero
• early poetry addressed to Hunt
• took a career in medicines, which is present in his writing
• lost parents at a young age

Question 2

Keats’ letters

Answer 2

• sense of his key ideas
• desire to render sensation
• negative capability
• Wordsworth: influence on Keats
• letter to Reynolds: shared admiration for Wordsworth
• letter to woodhouse: egotistical sublime

Question 3

Figures of speech

Answer 3

• couplets, ends on an unstressed syllable often
• seen as conveying a sense of weakness from other poets
• feature of juvenile writing
• use of synesthesia in writing
• use of boundaries
• oxymoron: logical contradiction, often living death in Keats’ writings

Question 4

Early sonnets

Answer 4

• Chapman’s Homer: importance of reading history’s literature
• experience is mediated to him through literature
• King Lear: based on a contrast about the kind of things he should be reading