Quotes About Keats

Johnny sighed in the darkness. "I don't understand the exact purpose of the Keats Project or the other Old Earth analogs, but I suspect that it is part of a TechnoCore project going back at least seven standard centuries to realize the Ultimate Intelligence." "The Ultimate Intelligence," I said, exhaling smoke. "Uh-huh. So the TechnoCore is trying to… what?… to build God." "Yes.

Red and blue shadows stretched across the amber lawn toward us. "Keats," I said.

I felt miserable. When Keats felt miserable he always put on a clean shirt. But he was a poet.

As for how criticism of Keats' poetry relates to criticism of my own work, I'll leave that for others to decide.

Muchas veces me he enamorado de la placentera muerte… John Keats

A thing of beauty is a joy forever Keats

Only those of our poets who kept solidly to the Shakespearean tradition achieved any measure of success. But Keats was the last great exponent of that tradition, and we all know how thin, how lacking in charm, the copies of Keats have become.

What can I do with these people? They come to the risk so dutifully. Are delighted by anecdotes that give them Poetry. Are grateful to be told of diagonals that give them Painting. Good people. But stubborn when warned the beast is not domestic. How can I persuade them that the dark, soulful Keats was five feet one? Liked fighting and bear-baiting? I can't explain the red hair. Nor say how you died so full of lust for Fanny Brawne. I will tell them of Semele.

All we need to know is that beauty is truth, said Keats, and I'm sorry to sound callous, but what he actually needed to know was the cure for his general malaise and for the illness that eventually killed him, aged twenty-five. *

Keats, it must be remembered, was a sensualist. His poems ... reveal him as a man not altogether free from the vulgarities of sensualism, as well as one who was able to transmute it into perfect literature.

was it a vision or a waking dream? Fled is that music--do I wake or sleep?

I am sailing with thee through the dizzy sky! How beautiful thou art!

The Public - a thing I cannot help looking upon as an enemy, and which I cannot address without feelings of hostility.

I feel confident I should have been a rebel Angel had the opportunity been mine.

Endymion received mostly negative criticism after its release and Keats himself admitted its diffuse and unappealing style. It was damned by many critics, giving rise to Byron's quip that Keats was ultimately "snuffed out by an article", suggesting that he never truly got over the criticism the poem received.

Pale wox I, and in vapours hid my face. Art thou, too, near such doom? vague

Do not all charms fly / At the mere touch of cold philosophy?

But the more I see of the damage simplistic thinking can do, the more I admire and cling to John Keats's notion of "negative capability" which he defined as the capacity to dwell in ambiguity or paradox without any "irritable reaching after fact and reason." To allow room for wonder, speculation, uncertainty.

To like Keats is a test of fitness for understanding poetry, just as to like Shakespeare is a test of general mental capacity.

Negative capability…quoting Keats: "Discard your memory," he implored. "Discard the future tense of your desire; forget…both what you knew and what you want, to leave space for a new idea.

We are aware that a civilization has the same fragility as a life. The circumstances that could send the works of Keats and Baudelaire to join the works of Menander are no longer inconceivable; they are in the newspapers.

Reading does not occupy me enough: the only relief I find springs from the composition of poetry, which necessitates contemplations that lift me above the stormy mist of sensations which are my habitual place of abode. I have lately been composing a poem on Keats; it is better than anything I have yet written and worthy both of him and of me.