What were Keats’s contributions?

– Keats was the greatest of the young Romantics.

• – The theme of his poetry: the everyday world of chaos dominated by death and decay vs. the eternal beauty and lasting truth of poetry and the human imagination.
• – Elements of Hellenism, feeling for the Middle Ages
• – A special conception of what a poet should be: suffering is necessary for the understanding of the world; great poetry grows from deep suffering and tragedy

His work:

• – Poems: attracted very little attention
• – Endymion: a poetic Romance: extensive use of Greek mythology; search for an ideal love and happiness beyond earthly possibility
• o Theme: A shepherd’s love for the Moon and his search for her
• – Lamia and Other Poems (Ode to a Nightingale; Hyperion; Isabella,…): Keats develops a poetic language; everything in the poems is balanced; Keats’s odes are considered to be the best of short poems in the century
• o elusive beauty: tends to escape from whoever wants to possess -> the subject of Keats’s ballads written between 1818-1820
• – La Belle Dame sans Merci: his most famous ballad; full of magical and fantastic images; Keats uses unfamiliar vocabulary: OE words, archaisms
•  Themes:

•  Dream vs. reality
•  Imagination vs. actuality
•  Superstition vs. supernatural
• o Influenced Robert Graves and the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood