john keats

[keatssucks15]

JOHN KEATS SUCKS!!!!!!!!, William Blake is the shit. keats sucks blakes nuts., William is by far the best romantic poet, BITCHES

[Saturn]

Hey, I just couldn't resist answering your detailed and well-constructed criticism.

I am glad to see that you have offered an opinion, and everyone here welcomes differing opinions; but, might I suggest by the childish way you gave that opinion, your are in no way capable of understanding such a deeply metaphysical and mystical poet such as Blake, never mind the subtleties of Keats' verse.

Can I ask what was the point of joining the John-Keats.com forum and then dissing him. Why didn't you just go to a Blake website and diss Keats?

Both are great poets for different reasons - Blake for his epic otherworldliness, and Keats for his own sensual romanticism.

Also, if we must use phrases like 'Romantic poets', technically Blake was born before the first wave of English Romanticism of Coleridge and Wordsworth, and, even though he lived into the age of Byron, Keats and Shelley; Blake was very much shaped by an enlightenment world-view shaped by his own individual experiences and beliefs.

I don't know why I'm bothering to take this so seriously, but it just annoys me when people write such pointless, immature comments. Surely you can post them on some dumb teenage-dirtbag forum somewhere else.

Haven't you got anything better to do?

I know I haven't, so I have an excuse.

Please leave this forum to the losers and get back to your own life!!

[keatssucks15]

man, how can you even compare blake to keats, your a fag man. blake is easily THE BEST Romantic poet, ever. lord byron is a better romantic poet then keats, LORD BYRON. you fags just can't admit he sucks donkey balls. jesus christ, even Samuel Taylor Coleridge is a better poet, you fags just can't admit keats sucks.

[MonroeDoctrine]

The idea that Keats is a Romantic expresses the utter ignorance of our human civilization. The ideas that Keats has in his poetry have nothing to do with "senses" as was asserted by someone in this discussion, for why would he say, "heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter?"

Keats and Shelly's method of writing manifest the American Revolution and Republican ideas of the time. One can notice that by Shelly's poem about Napolean where Shelly calls himself a Republican.

[Saturn]

I am struggling to make sense of MonroeDoctrine's post.

If I said Keat's poetry was 'sensual' perhaps I should modify it to sensuous, i.e. appealing to the senses; a delicate perception of beauty which Keats' work certainly displays. Also remember he longed for "...a life of Sensations rather than Thoughts."

Keats lived in the world, he felt passions. He was a dreamer, but he did experience his life to the fullest of his capacities. He almost certainly experienced the pleasures of the flesh.
He once wrote "Give me Books, fruit, french wine and fine we[a]ther and a little music out of doors..."

By calling him a 'Romantic' I was not using this in the pejoritive sense, but just using the adjective which practically all commentators use to describe that period in literary history.

I don't understand the claim that Shelley and Keats' method of writing 'manifest the American Revolution and Republican ideals of the time'. In what way do their 'methods' of writing express these ideas - what exactly do you mean by 'methods'?

It is certainly true that Shelley was a fervent and passionate supporter of Republics and advocated a new English Republic. Keats' position though is less clear cut. He was definitely an admirer of the patriotic South American Revolutionary Simon Bolivar, and his liberal views in general predispose him to favour the spread of republicanism.

However, it must be remembered that even in those days there was a frustartion that the unreformed American Constituion, in which blacks were still slaves, worried many European liberals and helped push along the cause of abolition in Britain championed by Wilberforce. The American constitution was then, and remians, a flawed, idealistic idea of democracy in which the theory is not always reconcilable to the reality of life.

Both Shelley and Keats were men of their time, no matter how advanced they seem today. They (particularly Shelley) came to realise that change must not come too precipitously - that was the tragedy of the French Revolution.

It was left to Byron; the aristocratic poet, to prophesy that "...in a century or two the new English & Spanish Atlantides will be masters of the old countries in all proabability - as Greece and Europe overcame their mother Asia in the older or earlier ages as they are called."

[MonroeDoctrine]

I enjoy the fact that you acknowledge the Republican circulatory system that was distributing the vital blood of human liberty at the time, yet you're conception of Keats disturbs me!

Why would Keats say, "My spirit is too weak---mortality weighs
heavily on me like unwilling sleep?" Saying that mortality weighs heavily on him implys the burden and horror of the body interfering with who he is, i.e. his spirit. He speaks of his mortal flesh like a flaw in this poem (On Seeing The Elgin Marbles) in the first line, how can you not recognize the fact that Keats is a Platonic Thinker! He had a lot of respect for Christ and Socrates which he makes clear in one of his letters. When I spoke about method I was discussing this humanist/loving quality of his poetry that lies beyond the flesh.

Read La Belle Dame Sans Merci to see how Keats shows the tragic flaw of being enamored with soely the flesh.

Therefore ye soft pipes play on, not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared: Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone!

[Saturn]

I just want to acknowledge MonroeDoctrine's post.

This has become an interesting debate, considering it was started by some stupid fool!

However, he/she has mistaken what I wrote in my previous post.
I did not mean to imply that Keats was solely enamoured of his earthly body. Indeed I believe that he wished to live in the mind and spirit - see his doctrine of 'soul making'.

I did in no way mean he was some kind of gross pleasure seeker.
All I want people to do is realise that Keats was a human being with great passions which were not all fulfilled by 'continual drinking of Knowledge'.
He was not some remote, perfect being - that is falling in to the trap of believing the sanctified picture, which has purged him of his real self.

Shelley's Adonias is a wonderful elegy, but it is also a distortion of who Keats was and what his work stood for.

I recognise that Keats was very self-concious about his body - his height was particularly a major drawback to him in life. Also his medical training, and the experience of nursing his mother and brother Tom in their illnesses no doubt gave him a horror of the human body and flesh in general.

All artists have earthly flaws and we should not seek to bowlderize their lives by taking away the passions and the failings that we do not like or approve of. We should rather celebrate their flaws, as these are what make them accessible, and we can relate more to people whose failings are our own.

Have you never detected the great love Keats had of bawdy language in his letters and playful poems?
Perhaps this side of him is something you want to ignore or excise from your concept of the man.

[MonroeDoctrine]

No man in the Universe has been entirely flawless! I agree, but there is certainly a direction to any man's life. I am willing to argue assiduously that had Keats lived another 20 years, the world we live in would be entirely different.

Keats' mind improves the spirit of human civilization in its entire continuity. He is truely crucial for human civilization, and I respect his revolutionary writing. Keats' poems were meant to aid humanity to fix its psychological problems. La Belle Dame Sans Merci is a poem not so that people can become tragic but so that people can avoid tragedy.

[MonroeDoctrine]

Anyway I think I'm done debating but we can still continue the dialogue

[Ellen]

I think that Keats wrote about tragedy, so that we can all better handle some of the inevitible tragedies in our personal lives. I think that he wrote about beauty to so that we can all appreciate the beauty in our own lives. I think that he wrote about love so that we can cultivate more love in our own lives. His works are not meant to drag people down, whereas they are meant to uplift the reader. Since there was no television, poetry was also entertainment, and something to talk about and discuss.

Ellen

[MonroeDoctrine]

Keats is writing to make mankind better. I shall ever argue that Keats loved human civilization and wanted to make human's more perfect. The point of tragedy is not to be tragic, the point of tragedy is in fact, to not be tragic.

I know Keats wrote about Platonic thinking! I know Keats understood the importance of the American Revolution and great thinkers of the time period. I know Keats understood the kind of horrible poetry Lord Byron, and Wordsworth were uttering. He actually talks about how the greatest poet has no ego! Thus expressing his intention not to entertain but to communicate ideas to other human beings. Usually ego maniacs tend to "entertain" just look at NAZIs like George Carlin.

[Ellen]

Yesterday I was reading "Two Sonnets on Fame". (The poems are on this website. In my book, they are alphabetized via the word two, not sonnet.)

"FAME, like a wayward girl, will still be coy
To those who woo her with too slavish knees,
But makes surrender to some thoughtless boy,
And dotes the more upon a heart at ease, etc......"

Anyhow, I do think that Keats wrote to help people think also. Keats did not write to be famous, in my opinion, and he wrote to express himself, and to help people learn something about life. I have known many people who want to be famous, but they never achieve this goal. Perhaps it happens because they just want to woo fame, but they do not want to work hard and be high achievers. They really do expect someone else to make them famous. Though Keats may have been the thoughtless boy in the poem, he did work hard to become an excellent poet. He just was not working to become famous.

Ellen

[Saturn]

I think that MonroeDoctrine is unjust and grossly unfair about the poetry of Byron and Wordsworth.
No offence intended, but to me this perhaps smacks of the zealous worshipper, who is blind to the merits of all others. Keats or any other artists do not exist in vacuums!!

This may be a blasphemous remark on these hallowed Keatsian pages, but I am a great admirer of Byron's WORK (his life is always overexposed at it's expense) and many other poets (shock! horror!).

Have you ever read any Byron? The third and fourth cantos of Childe Harold, Beppo, The Vision of Judgement, Darkness, and of course Don Juan; (just to mention some of his most famous works),
are undoubted masterpieces printed with the touch of genius which influenced European poetry for a century and more.

Wordsworth also (by no means a favourite of mine) wrote many fine poems which influenced Keats directly; particularly 'Tintern Abbey' and his lines in 'The Excursion' about the formation of classical mythology greatly coloured Keats own mythological epics. See also his sonnets 'On the Extinction of The Venetian Republic', 'Scorn Not the Sonnet' and, also, his early versions of the Prelude for great self-examination and exploration of the origins of art.

Both poets influenced Keats himself in some way. Although Keats later affected to despise Byron and all his works; at first he cultivated the Byronic dressage and a worldly disdain which was part of the Byronic myth.

Both poets had, to me, distasteful and patronising attitudes to Keats himself and his work (as did Shelley to an extent ). Byron's contempt is well known, but he later softened after reading 'Hyperion' and he came to believe that he was not just another peasant poet (admittedly after his death, and Shelley's reprimands).

Worsdworth too had a somewhat superior view of Keats, once remarking about 'Endymion' (I think) that it was a' pretty piece of paganism'. Also his aloofness and political turncoating disgusted both Byron, Shelley and also Keats.

However we should not see these poets through the eyes of Keats himself and not through actually reading their own work.
It must be understood that at a certain level Keats must have been jealous of the success and noble ancestry of Byron and the patronage and the respect afforded to Wordsworth.

Keats did not want to be famous in the modern sense (the modern pohenomenon would have been impossible for him to comprehend), but he did want to be known and read in the future, 'to be in the mouth of fame', which is a respect afforded to artists throughout the ages by the agency of uncertain Posterity.

Here's some quotes to prove Byron and Worsworth's merits:

Byron -
"But words are things, and a small drop of ink,
Falling like dew upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions think..."

Wordsworth -
"There are in our existence spots of time
Which with distinct preeminence retain
A fructifying virtue, whence, depressed
By trivial occupations and the round
Of ordinary intercourse, our minds -
Especially the imaginative power -
Are nourished and invisibly repaired.
Such moments chiefly seem to have their date
In our first childhood."

These are two very different poets, but not unequal to the laurels which adorn Keats' brow, all three deserve to advance 'gradus ad Parnassum' ( a step to Parnassus).

Sorry for the length of this, I feel very strongly about it!!

[keatssucks15]

wow, you guys are really, really gay

[Saturn]

Why don't you go take a long walk off a short cliff.

Your stupid comments have plagued this site too long. Why don't you go do something that isn't 'gay' instead?

Anyway, what is 'gay' about having intelligent discussions about literature and art?

To call this 'gay', is to say that everyone who ever had an intelligent or philosophic view of the world as somehow strange.

What exactly do you mean by gay; homosexual, or gay in the sense of dull and artsy-fartsy chatter?


Why don't you leave us alone, as you clearly show nothng but contempt for Keats and those who are interested in him?