John Keats: vita e opere

JOHN KEATS: VITA E OPERE

John Keats Life (1795-1821) He was one of the greatest member of the group of the second generation of romantic poets.

He was a poet of an artistic perfection using an extreme purity of form and language. Keats has indeed become an symbolic figure in English literature, the figure of the artist who regards his life in the service of poetry and poetry as a religion: he said. Keats was born in London in 1795. he became a medical student in London but by that time he announced his decision to devote his life to poetry and in 1817 with the help of Shelley he published his first volume of verses: “Poems by John Keats”. A second phase in Keats' development as a poet is marked by the composition of “Endymion”; a long mythological poem in four books.

JOHN KEATS OPERE PRINCIPALI

The story, taken from Greek mythology, tells about the love between Endymion and the moon, in this poem we can see his love for Greek civilisation. In the last years of his life seriously ill with consumption (TB, a family illness: his mother and brother died of Tb) and tormented by his unhappy love for a young girl, Keats closed himself in the “monastery of his imagination” and wrote all his bast poetry. His third and last volume of poetry is to be placed among the most memorable achievements of English poetry in the nineteenth century. The volume contained tales in verse, the unfinished poem of “Hyperion” (a long narrative poem under Milton's influence) and all his great odes: “Ode to a Nightingale”, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, “To Autumn”, “Ode to (on) Melancholy”, “To Psyche” etc… The tales in verse, especially “The eve of St. Agnes” have a purity and perfection of language but it is in the odes that Keats gave the greatest expression of his poetic genius.

John Keats: poetica

JOHN KEATS VITA IN INGLESE

Here we can find the central theme, the drama of Keats and all Romantic generation that means a conflict between the real and the ideal, between the reality and dream and the human aspiration towards a paradise of beauty, freedom and happiness and the tragic human condition to live in a world where we can find the power of sorrow, and death which characterised man's existence. With the odes is also to be remembered the ballad of “La Belle Dame sans merci” a poem an the old theme of the femme fatale. In 1820, the symptoms of consumption (tuberculosis) became evident.

JOHN KEATS: LIFE AND WORKS

So he travelled to Italy in an attempt to recover his health but he died in Rome in 1821 and he was buried in the Protestant Cemetery of Rome. Keats lived o short but intense life in fact he died at the age of twenty-five years old. The intuition that he was to die early is, perhaps, responsible for his great activity as poet. The substance of his poetry In his lyrical poems there are some personal experiences but they are “behind” the odes, not their substance as for Wordsworth or Shelley or Byron.

Approfondimento: Dici di amarmi: testo, analisi e parafrasi della poesia di Keats