Quotes from John Keats

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,'--that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. - Ode to a Grecian Urn

Souls of Poets dead and gone,What Elysium have ye known,Happy field or mossy cavern,Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?Have ye tippled drink more fineThan mine host's Canary wine?

I myself am pursuing the same instinctive course as the veriest human animal you can think of—I am however young writing at random—straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness—without knowing the bearing of any one assertion of any one opinion. Yet may I not in this be free from sin?

Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;Loosens her fragrant bodice; by degreesHer rich attire creeps rustling to her knees.

Asleep in lap of legends old.

Already with thee! tender is the night.

With a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forgetWhat thou among the leaves hast never known,The weariness, the fever, and the fretHere, where men sit and hear each other groan;Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,Where youth grows pale, and specter-thin, and dies;Where but to think is to be full of sorrowAnd leaden-eyed despairs.

The poetry of earth is never dead.

As to the poetical character itself… it is not itself—it has no self—it is every thing and nothing… It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen.

The crown of theseIs made of love and friendship, and sits highUpon the forehead of humanity.

What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth.

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

Bards of Passion and of Mirth,Ye have left your souls on earth!Have ye souls in heaven too,Double-lived in regions new?

That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,In some melodious plotOf beechen green, and shadows numberless,Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

She looked at me as she did love,And made sweet moan.

I met a lady in the meadsFull beautiful, a faery's child;Her hair was long, her foot was light,And her eyes were wild.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bellTo toll me back from thee to my sole self!

The grandeur of the doomsWe have imagined for the mighty dead.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?To what green altar, O mysterious priest,Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?

At once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.

A virgin purest lipp'd, yet in the loreOf love deep learned to the red heart's core.

O, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,Alone and palely loitering?The sedge has withered from the lake,And no birds sing!

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may findThee sitting careless on a granary floor,Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,Drows'd with the fume of poppies while thy hookSpares the next swath and all its twined flowers.