John Keats

John Keats (1795-1821) was an English poet, the son of a livery-stable proprietor, born at Finsbury, London. He never went to a university, but was apprenticed to a London surgeon, and subsequently practised medicine himself in London. Abandoning his profession in 1817, he devoted himself to literature, made the acquaintance of Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt, Lamb, Wordsworth, and other literary men. He left London for Carisbrooke, moved next year to Teignmouth, but on a visit to Scotland contracted what proved to be consumption. In 1819, he was betrothed to Miss Fanny Browne, and struggled against ill-health and financial difficulties till his health completely gave way in the autumn of 1820. Accompanied by the artist Joseph Severn he went to Naples and then to Rome, where, in the spring following, he died. His works were three volumes of poetry, "Poems" 1817, "Endymion" 1818, "Lamia, Isabella and other Poems," including "Hyperion" and "The Eve of St. Agnes" 1820. He never reached maturity in his art, but the dignity, tenderness, and imaginative power of his work contained the highest promise. He was a man of noble character, sensitive, yet strong, unselfish, and magnanimous, by some regarded as the most original of modern poets.

Wisdom & Quotes

• Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.

- To Autumn

• Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too.
- To Autumn

• There is not a fiercer hell than the failure in a great object.

- Endymion, preface

• A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:

Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness.
- Endymion

• 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' - that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
- Ode on a Grecian Urn

• Then I felt like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He started at the Pacific - and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise -
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
- On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

• The poetry of earth is never dead.

- On the Grasshopper and The Cricket

• A man should have the fine point of his soul taken off to become fit for this world.

- letter to J H Reynolds, November 22, 1817

• I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.

- letter to J A Hessey, October 9, 1818

• Oh what can ail thee, wretched wight,

Alone and palely loitering;
The sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
- La Belle Dame Sans Merci

• Love in a hut, with water and a crust,

Is - Love, forgive us - cinders, ashes, dust.
- Lamia

• Philosophy will clip an angel's wing.

- Lamia

• Do not all charms fly

At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
- Lamia

• Here lies one whose name was writ in water.

- epitaph for himself

• Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity - it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

- letter to John Taylor, February 27, 1818

• If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.

- letter to John Taylor

• Then on the shore

Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.
- When I have Fears

• The roaring of the wind is my wife and the stars through the window pane are my children.

- letter to George and Georgina Keats, October 14, 1818

Nicholas I