Throughout history, humans’ fascination with art has sprung from the emotional response that a beautiful piece evokes. A sample of art’s effect on its viewer is conveyed in ekphrastic poetry, a medium by which poets, moved by works of art, attempt...

The value of art is timeless to a great extent, with the exception of subtle nuances which can be attributed to the progressiveness of modern society. John Keats’ artistic style embraces the worship of nature and the exploration of the individual...

Within ‘In the Drear-Nighted December’ and ‘On the Sea’ Keats displays the formidable, eternal power that nature holds over man both physically and emotionally. Whilst being stationed in the unrelieved, mundane city to train as an apothecary as a...

Many tragic villains throughout a scope of tragedies have left audiences debating whether they were truly in the wrong, writers often introduce an ambiguity to their plays, novels or poems to allow the audience to debate the morality of the play....

In a variety of the works we have read so far in class, there have been evidence of unhealthy attachment and obsession in characters, specifically with those who have lost a love one. This ultimately results in a loss of identity in the...

In attempting to maneuver the changing modern world, early 20th century poets struggled to reconcile ‘old’ world views with the new normal. In a letter to his brothers, English Romantic poet Keats mediated this pervasive sense of inner conflict by...

John Keats’ poems “Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art” and “When I have fears that I may cease to be” both revolve around the topics of death and the fragility of life. He writes of his desire to stay in his present state, afraid of...

The theme of gender and power is prevalent in both Keats’ poetry and Tender is the Night. The power wielded by men and women within both Keats’ poems and Fitzgerald’s novel is often conflicting; Keats writes of beautiful and destructive...

With reference to John Keats, Sidney Colvin comments that “the spirit which animates him is essentially the spirit of delight: delight in the beauty of nature and the vividness of sensation.” Indeed, Keats’ treatment of nature- truthful to the...

John Keats' poems "When I Have Fears" and "Bright Star" are remarkably similar, yet drastically different at the same time. The Shakespearean sonnets share rhyme scheme as well as subject matter, yet deal with different facets of the same topic....

John Keats is known for his vibrant use of imagery in his poetry. At least twenty paintings have been rendered as a result of his expressive imagery. In Ode to a Nightingale, he uses synesthetic imagery in the beginning by combining senses...

The cursory reading of this poem is that it is merely a story of a knight bewitched by beauty, who becomes abject slave to a fairy woman, and who falls asleep, waking up alone and dying on a hillside in the meadow. However it could be perceived as...

"The Eve of St. Agnes" tells the fantastic story of a bewitching night when two lovers consummate their relationship and elope. It takes place on the Eve of St. Agnes, a night when "young virgins have visions of delight," giving the action of the...

Of all the English poets that comprise the Romantic period, George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), John Keats (1795-1821), and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) stand as the quintessential masters of Romantic poetry. Their contributions to the...

Form as Strategy: Keats's "On the Sonnet" and "Bright Star"

"On the Sonnet" is a poem that deplores convention, flouts convention, is governed by convention, and recuperates convention. It is neither a proper Petrarchan poem nor a Shakespearean...

In John Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale," a despairing speaker overhears a nightingale in the depths of a far away forest. The speaker yearns to leave behind his physical world and join the bird in its metaphysical world. The nightingale sings of a...

John Keats' sonnet "When I have Fears that I may Cease to Be," written in 1818 when the poet was twenty-three years old, deals with the young man's fears that he will not live long enough to accomplish what he wants to in life. He is afraid that...

William Blake and John Keats were both prolific English poets of the Romantic era. Blake, an early Romantic along with Wordsworth and Coleridge, produced a poem called "Night" in 1789, which is part of a series of illustrated poetry called "Songs...

The Romantic Movement of poetry focused on the return to the individual as much as the political revolutions of the time. In doing so, there is also a return to the natural world in poetry that had been superseded by a more predominant abstract...

In "Ode to a Nightingale," John Keats uses nature and a nightingale as figures for an optimistic view on mortality, and on the speaker's life specifically. Throughout the poem, the nightingale itself is an figure for the beautiful and cyclical...

John Keats’ “Ode on Melancholy” is a complex poetic investigation into the equally complex emotions of pain and sadness. Melancholy is defined as a gloomy state of mind, a dejection, depression, or despondency. Keats urges the reader to view...

Keats’ “To Autumn” is an ode that concerns itself more with the true nature of reality than many of his earlier works. The Spring Odes—“Ode to Psych”, “Ode to a Nightingale”, and “Ode on a Grecian Urn”—are all representative of consistent...

Like much of the poetry of Keats, these three poems explore life’s contrasts of pleasure and pain, happiness and sorrow, permanence and impermanence. The mortal pleasures of Beauty and Love are longed for, but proven to be all too often tempered...

Keats’s preoccupation with the inescapable precession of time and mutability is evident in all three poems: “Ode to a Nightingale,”, the ode “To Autumn” and the sonnet, “Bright Star, Would I were as Steadfast as Thou Art.” In his “Ode to a...