John Keats To a Nothingale

He was born 31 October 1795. His father died young leaving his wife with four children. Keats's mother died of tuberculosis when he was barely 14, the same illness that later killed Keats himself. Keats attended school at Enfield, where he made friends with the school-master's son, Charles Cowden Clarke. It was Clarke who first introduced Keats to literature and encouraged him to write poetry. Keats studied to be an apothecary but in 1816 he decided to give up medicine to devote himself entirely to poetry. His first volume of poetry was published in March 1817. At the same time he began to suffer from persistent sore throats. September 1818 marked the beginning of the so called 'Great Year'. The Eve of St. Agnes, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Ode to a Nightingale and Ode on a Grecian Urn were all written during this period. He became increasingly ill. It was believed that the Italian climate could save him, and that the change would do his spirits good too. He went to Rome In 1820. But sadly, he did not write a single line of poetry during his time there. He died in February 1821. More than that of any of the other romantics, Keat’s poetry is a response to sensuous impressions. He found neither the time nor the inclination to elaborate a complete moral or social philosophy in his poetry. In such poems as „The Eve of St. Agnes“, „Ode on a Grecian Urn“, and „Ode to a Nightingale“, he showed an unrivaled awareness of immediate sensation and an uneduqualed ability to reproduce it. His work had a more profund influence than that of any other romantic in widening the sensuous realm of poetry for the Victorians later in the century. He was one of the most important figures of early nighteen century Romanticism, a movement that espoused the sanctity of emotion of imagination and privileged the beauty of the natural world. Keats doesn’t believe that poets should use their works to help reform the world as Shelley, he prefered to emphasize the poet’s responsibility to make his works as beautiful as possible by ‚loading every rift with ore. Keats is represented as the Romantic poet who has the greatest success in balancing the demands of poetic identity and personal identity. The most famous statement Keats makes regarding the poet’s identity is that the poet has no character at all. As such, the poet is always vulnerable to having identity, to ‚get outside the prison of his body‘.

His greatest successes in this endeavor come in Odes, especially „Ode to a Nighitingale“ where ‚on the very point of extasy, the bird leaves him‘. Many of the ideas and themes evident in Keat’s great odes are quintessentially Romantic concerns: the beauty of nature, the relation between imagination and creativity, the response of passions of the beauty and suffering, and the transcience of human life in time. The sumptuous sensory language in which the odes are written, their idealistic concern for beauty and truth, and their expressive agony in the face of death are all Romantic preoccupations. The odes don’t exactly tell a story - there is no unifying plot and no recurring characters – there is little evidence that Keats intended them to stand together as a single work of art and the extraordinary number of suggestive interrelations between them is impossible to ignore. The odes explore and develop the same themes, partake of many of same approaches and images, and ordered in a certain way, exhibit an unmistencable psychological development.

Ode to a Nightingale

In first 30 rhymes of this poems Keats talks about the world like a hopeless and dirty place with sick thoughts, where the people only bear pains. He describes the world and the suffering of the people in a very sensory way, he talks about the worst situations and feelings which the human can suffer ( the weariness, the fever, and the fret ). Keats wants to emphasize the difference between the world of nightingale and his own world.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards: 34

And after, he wants to be like a nightingale, with his freedom. And he wants to fly on the wings of poesy, wich is the symbol of his escape of this world.
In all the poem Keats uses all the senses, I think tahat is for emphasize the feelings of the reader. He uses very complex language, his words are not simple, it is a real poesy.
I have been half in love with easeful Death, 52

Keats use the symbol of the conflict withe death, one of the symbols of Romanticism. I think that the poem Ode to a Nightingale is very emphatic poem, we can say that it play to our senses and feelings. Keats tries to make his works as beautiful as possible and I think that this poem is a real evident.