Keats

Question 1

Common Ideas

Answer 1

• beauty
  
  • echoes of a world beyond ours
• theory of negative capability
  
  • importance of being fully in the moment
  • accepting what that moment brings you without irritable reach for understanding
  • what gives value to something is how much feeling you give to it
• the sensual details
• young poet
  
  • feels so intensely
• debts to Classical and British sources
  
  • Spencer
  • Shakespeare
  • Milton
• concern with nature
  
  • often in opposition to art

Question 2

Ode to a Nightingale

Answer 2

• May 1819
• central contrast
  
  • the poet in a spiritual or physical darkness
  • outside his window is a nightingale singing
  • song metonymically associated with poetry
• written about 4 months after Tom’s (brother) death
  
  • survivor’s guilt
  • part of him in his grief feels that he shouldn’t be alive
  • another part wants the nightingale’s happiness
  • but not sure if he deserves it

Question 3

Structure

Answer 3

• movement through the production of a poem
  
  • inception
  • mood of the act of creation
  • return to a mundane world
• structure
  
  • 10 line stanzas
  • ABAB, CDECDE
  • iambic pentameter
    
    • except line 8 - trimeter
    • stanza 2 - last line, alexandrine

Question 4

Stanzas

Answer 4

1 - nightingale
2 - wine, poetic creation and transendence
3 - to live in the world is too painful, transcience
4 - change in mood, poetic inspiration without wine, the night
5 - the dark bower, commits to an act of belief, long for summer
6 - temptation of suicide, if dead he would be an insensitive clod of earth, song becomes a requiem
7 - connections to fairy story of the emperor and the nightingale, Ruth, moment of transcendence, art as immortality
8 - disappearing nightingale, moment of waking, back to loneliness, which world is real or awake - mundane life or poetic inspiration

Question 5

Biographical Info

Answer 5

• 1795-1821
• born in London
• eldest son of Thomas and Frances Keats
• received an exceptionally good education
  
  • liberal and progressive approach
  • influence on his thinking and future political ideals
• 1814 - first poem
  
  • sonnet in the imitation of Spencer
• Oct-Dec 1816 - on Chapman’s Homer
  
  • experience of reading
    1817 - Endymion
  • exercise of beginning a great poem greatly influenced his career
  • the Elgin Marbles (from the Parthenon)
    
    • differences between life and art
    • the contrasts between the cold yet immortal and the living yet transient
  • Keats went on a walking tour in the Lake District
• relationship with Fanny Brawne (no financial prospects)
• series of odes
  
  • Ode to Autumn
  • Ode to a Grecian Urn
  • Ode to a Nightingale
• 1819 - became seriously ill
  
  • friends gathered money to send him to Italy for the winter
  • just before he left, Fanny’s mother allowed their engagement
• 1820 - travels to Italy with Severn
• 1821 - died in Rome
  
  • buried outside the walls in the Anglican cemetery
  • unnamed stone