John Keats and Modern Day Audiences

John Keats and Modern Day Audiences

The focus of this essay is to describe the literary legacy of a poet that reflects the era of which was represented and also evaluate how their poetry affects modern day audiences.

John Keats is a renowned English poet of the Romantic Movement period which lasted from the late 18th to the mid-19th century. The tragedy of Keats’s life enabled him to write some of the most beautiful poetry that has ever been produced. Keats developed tuberculosis and died at the early age of twenty five. Therefore, Keats’s poetry mainly focuses on the melancholy themes such as love, death and nature.

These concepts are still relevant in contemporary times as they form the basis of the human behaviour. Jack Stillinger, a literary critic, who implies that “Keats concerns with dreaming, illusion, problems of time and mortality (which reflects towards modern audiences). The same may be said of the most characteristic tensions in the poems – the conflicting claims of human and immortal realms of existence, the opposition of attitudes toward the actual and the ideal. These provide structure and dramatic conflict, but they are not the equivalent of the poems either.” Today, three poems will be discussed to illustrate Keats legacy that is perpetuated throughout his work. They are ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, ‘To Autumn’ and ‘Bright Star’, which were all written in 1819.

Keats was born in October 1795 in London. Primarily, Keats became a medical student and received his apothecary's licence in 1816; however, he never practiced his profession as he decided to deepen his interest in literature. In the same year, Keats met Leigh Hunt, an editor of ‘The Examiner’ who published his first poem, ‘O Solitude! If I Must With Thee Dwell’. In 1817, Keats was showing signs of tuberculosis and from this point in time, the poems he wrote were enhanced with the concepts love and death, especially when he met Fanny Brawne in 1818, whom he quickly fell in love with.

The first poem to be looked at is “La Belle Dame sans Merci”. The poem features the Keats’ version of a medieval romance, through a knight and a fairy lady. This poem presents examples of metaphors through flowers. Line nine illustrates that the speaker “see(s) a lily on thy brow”. Lilies are generally connected with death and are pale white. The lily therefore shows that the knight is not dying, but sickly pale. Roses are usually associated with love, however, the rose in line eleven is “fading” and “wither(ing)”. This displays the metaphor of the end of a relationship and the knight’s continuing increase in his pale complexion, as the rose is “fading” from the knight’s “cheeks”. The theme of this poem is impossible love. Line thirty, “And there she wept and sigh'd full sore” suggests that the woman cares for the knight but knows that she cannot be with him as she is a fairy and he is human. The two are from fundamentally different worlds. This relates to Keats’ life as he himself was dying and he could not marry Brawne as she was from a wealthy background and his situation was the opposite. The theme in this poem can be applied to modern times if a man and woman love each other but cannot marry for various reasons such as cultural and religious factors.

During a September in 1819, Keats wrote many odes. One ode in particular is ‘To Autumn’. This poem is about the season of autumn coming to an end. Line fifteen of the poem, “Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind:”, features personification, alliteration and a metaphor which are most explicit in this line of the poem. The season is personified as having hair, while alliteration is evident through “winnowing wind”. The season is referred to as a female goddess as in those times, seasons were personified as beautiful women in European Art. Keats uses a metaphor when he compares autumn’s