Themes Flashcards
Imagination - letter of 22 November 1817 response to Benjamin Bailey’s doubts about the authenticity of the imagination.
‘I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of the Imagination… The Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream - he awoke and found it true.’
The imagination provides ‘“A Vision in the form of Youth” a Shadow of reality to come’.
Life of Sensations (Bailey letter)
‘O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!’
Intensity
‘the excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth.’
Crisis intensity
1818 ‘Epistle to John Hamilton Reynolds’ describes destructive vision of natural world and sees too intensely ‘Too far into the sea’ into the ‘core/ Of an eternal fierce destruction.’
Empathy - letter to Bailey
‘If a Sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existince and pick about the Gravel’.
In which letter does Keats’ describe the simile of human life as a ‘large Mansion of Many Apartments.’
Letter to J.H. Reynolds 3 May 1818
Knowledge
‘An extensive knowledge is needful to thinking people.’
In a letter to George Keats 1819 (21 April) what does Keats offer as an alternative to the common view of the world as a ‘vale of tears’ where God redeems and takes you to Heaven?
A parable of the world as ‘The vale of Soul-making’
Women - letter to Bailey
Keats harbours with regard to women ‘a gordian complication of feelings’.
Attraction and Fear of women - letters to Fanny
‘unalloy’d Happiness’
‘Ask yourself my love whether you are not very cruel to have so entrammelled me, so destroyed my freedom.’
Keats treated women as any man of his time
he will not spend ‘any time with Ladies unless they are handsome.’
Keats treated women as any man of his time
he will not spend ‘any time with Ladies unless they are handsome.’
What book examines the importance of paintings and sculptures to Keats’ imagination?
Ian Jack’s “Keats and the Mirror of Art”
Who started the fashion for Greek art and what is the translation of his work called?
German art historian Johann Winckelmann (1717-68)
‘Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of Greece published by J.H. Fuseli
What essay explained Keats’ reverence for Greek culture as it focussed on the present.
Schiller’s essay 1795 ‘On the naive and sentimental’
