Trips to the Isle of Wight

[Endymion]

C'mon! Let's get this place going a little ... so much to say about such a great influence on poetry and psychology and modern thought deserves a little more thought and attention...

Does anyone know if the places Keats stayed in the Isle of Wight are still about? As I live relatively close I was going to take a trip out there before too long ... anybody happen to know? I would love to visit Carisbrooke Castle and Blackgang Chine.

Why is there a memorial to Tennyson glaring at me from the postcard, but no mention of Keats?!??

[Guest]

I believe so.

[Guest]

hello..i love keats

[Keats rocks my world]

Hey,
I am studying Keats as part of my A-Level English Lit course and have found his poems suprisingly interesting and relevant to the way that I am living my life at the moment. His ideas on Negative Capability strike a chord and his attitudes to life also seem eerily similar to that of an eighteen year old social anarchist.

[Endymion]

You wouldn't believe now how much social anarchy is popular in all socieities. I've come to realise it's a measure of dissatisfaction with the world, a sense of betrayal that this is all life will amount to. You don't want to be pigeon-holed into the social norm.

I wonder really if any modern social anarchist like yourself would read "This Living Hand, now Warm and Capable" they wouldn't be struck with awe at the sheer morbidity of it, and the intense beauty.

From memory, this is it:

"This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping would, if it were cold,
And in the icy silence of the tomb
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thy wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
That in my veins red life might stream again
And thou be conscience-calmed
See - here it is - I hold it towards you."

please correct me if there are any mistakes.
What do you think Rocks?

[Cath]

Does anyone know if the places Keats stayed in the Isle of Wight are still about?

The cottage where he stayed in Shanklin seems to be still standing, although the building has been extended. It's called - predictably enough - Keats Cottage these days (previously Eglantine cottage):
http://www.isleofwight.com/keatscottage/

The website talks about Keats's room being "more luxuriously furnished than in Keats's time" - no kidding! Presumably there wasn't a TV or welcome tray either

Has anyone been to the Isle of Wight for the purpose of looking at the Keats sites? I only went over as a kid on a school-trip to look at the multi-coloured sand, they didn't tell us about JK...

[Cybele]

The website talks about Keats's room being "more luxuriously furnished than in Keats's time" - no kidding! Presumably there wasn't a TV or welcome tray either

I'll bet there was no en suite, either!

[Cath]

Also I read at the beginning of Carol Walker's Walking North with Keats that when she visited the Isle of Wight in 1978 in the footsteps of Keats, one of the places in Shanklin where he and Charles Brown stayed had become....a hair salon! Poor bald Charles Brown.

[Cath]

Wow, now I've seen the photos Maureen put on the forum last year from her "Keatsian" Isle of Wight trip, I really want to go now!

http://www.john-keats.com/phpboard/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=8469

[BrokenLyre]

Who wouldn't want to go? I'd join you Cath!