Keats Massolit Flashcards

Keat's’ Background

came from a middle-class London family, not a rich one. He attended a progressive school where he learned ideas that made his poetry blend liberal thoughts with intense feelings about the real world. Writer Leigh Hunt helped his early career, but this led critics to call Keats a 'Cockney Poet.' Keats also trained as a doctor, and this medical experience influenced his poems, giving them a strong sense of physical detail and suffering. He also faced financial struggles with inherited money.

Keats’ Letters

Keats's letters are famous because they offer a real insight into his thoughts and key poetic ideas, even though he wasn't writing them as formal statements. Important ideas include wanting to show 'sensations' over just thoughts, the concept of 'Negative Capability'

Benjamin Bailey- 22nd Nov 1817

Tom and George- Dec 1817

The Examiner- May 1818

Oct 1818- RIchard Woodhouse

Figures of speech

• Feminine endings → soft, open line endings.

• Synesthesia → blending senses (fragrant sounds).

• Freeze‑frame adjectives → past participles capturing transition (globe peony).

• Oxymoron → paradoxical states (living death, joy + grief)

Early Sonnets

• Chapman’s Homer

  • Reading Homer through Chapman = “double richness” (ancient text + Elizabethan style).

  • Critics later saw this as a weakness (not reading Greek directly), but for Keats it was transformative.

• Theme of astonishment

  • Experience compared to discovery of new worlds (Cortez, new planet).

  • Key image: “wild surmise” → moment of frozen wonder.

• Connection to later poems

  • On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again: contrasts light romance with Shakespeare’s bittersweet doubleness.

  • When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be: explores richness of experience, mortality, fear of dying young before expressing all he had to say.