John Keats

John Keats lived only twenty-five years and four months (1795-1821), yet his poetic achievement is extraordinary. His writing career lasted a little more than five years (1814-1820), and three of his great odes--"Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," and "Ode on Melancholy"--were written in one month. Most of his major poems were written between his twenty-third and twenty-fourth years, and all his poems were written by his twenty-fifth year. In this brief period, he produced poems that rank him as one of the great English poets. He also wrote letters which T.S. Eliot calls "the most notable and the most important ever written by any English poet." His genius was not generally perceived during his lifetime or immediately after his death. Keats, dying, expected his poetry to be forgotten, as the epitaph he wrote for his tombstone indicates: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." But nineteenth century critics and readers did come to appreciate him, though, for the most part, they had only a partial understanding of his work. They saw Keats as a sensual poet; they focused on his vivid, concrete imagery; on his portrayal of the physical and the passionate; and on his immersion in the here and now. One nineteenth century critic went so far as to assert not merely that Keats had "a mind constitutionally inapt for abstract thinking," but that he "had no mind." Keats's much-quoted outcry, "O for a life of Sensation rather than of Thoughts!" (letter, November 22, 1817) has been cited to support this view. With the twentieth century, the perception of Keats's poetry expanded; he was and is praised for his seriousness and thoughfulness, for his dealing with difficult human conflicts and artistic issues, and for his impassioned mental pursuit of truth. Keats advocated living "the ripest, fullest experience that one is capable of"; he believed that what determines truth is experience ("axioms are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses").