artifact 7. John Keats.

 

John Keats (31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821) was the last born of the English Romantic poets and, at 25, the youngest to die. Along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, he was one of the key figures in the second generation of the Romantic movement, despite the fact that his work had been in publication for only four years before his death. During his life, his poems were not generally well received by critics; however, his reputation grew and he held significant posthumous influence on many later poets, including Alfred Tennyson and Wilfred Owen.
The poetry of Keats is characterised by sensual imagery, most notably in the series of odes. Today his poems and letters are considered as among the most popular and analysed in English literature.
John Keats was born on 31 October 1795 to Thomas and Frances Jennings Keats. He was the eldest of their four surviving children—George (1797–1841), Thomas (1799–1818), and Frances Mary "Fanny" (1803–89). A son was lost in infancy. John was born in central London, although there is no clear evidence of the exact location. His father was working as a barman at the Hoop and Swan pub when Keats was born, an establishment Thomas later managed and where the growing family would live for some years.
His first surviving poem—An Imitation of Spenser—comes in 1814, when Keats was nineteen. In 1815, Keats registered as a medical student at Guy's Hospital (now part of King's College London). Within a month of starting, he was accepted for a dressership position within the hospital — a significant promotion with increased responsibility and workload, taking up precious writing time and increasing his ambivalence to working in medicine. Strongly drawn by an ambition inspired by fellow poets such as Leigh Hunt and Byron, but beleaguered by family financial crises that continued to the end of his life, he suffered periods of deep depression. His brother George wrote that John "feared that he should never be a poet, & if he was not he would destroy himself". In 1816, Keats received his apothecary's license but before the end of the year he announced to his guardian that he had resolved to be a poet, not a surgeon.
When Keats died at the age of 25, he had been seriously writing poetry for barely six years — from 1814 until the summer of 1820 – and publishing for four. His first poem, the sonnet O Solitude appeared in the Examiner in May 1816, while his collection Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes and other poems came in July 1820 before his final voyage to Rome. The compression of his poetic apprenticeship and maturity into so short a time is just one remarkable aspect of Keats's work. Although he was prolific during his short writing life, and is now one of the most studied and admired of British poets, his reputation rests on a fairly small body of work, centered on the Odes.
Poetry did not come easy to Keats. Throughout his life he maintained a strong sense of the particular and fantastic, yet his early work was unremarkable and roundly dismissed by some critics who saw his position as only afforded by his influential friends. Keats's most successful verse came as a result of a deliberate and prolonged self-education in classical literature. Although he said "if poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all", and he may have possessed an innate poetic sensibility, his early works were of a poet learning his craft. According to literary historian William Walsh it was often vague – "infatuated by the...languorously narcotic which often dimmed his clear eye for the objective". It was only in the creative outpouring in the last years of his short life that he was able to express in craft the inner intensity for which he is has been lauded since his death. Keats felt he had made no mark in his lifetime. Knowing he was dying, he had written to Fanny Brawne in February 1820, "I have left no immortal work behind me — nothing to make my friends proud of my memory — but I have lov'd the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember'd."
Here his firs surviving poem:

                                                    An Imitation of Spencer.

NOW Morning from her orient chamber came,
And her first footsteps touch’d a verdant hill;
Crowning its lawny crest with amber flame,
Silv’ring the untainted gushes of its rill;
Which, pure from mossy beds, did down distill,	5
And after parting beds of simple flowers,
By many streams a little lake did fill,
Which round its marge reflected woven bowers,
And, in its middle space, a sky that never lowers.
There the king-fisher saw his plumage bright	10
Vieing with fish of brilliant dye below;
Whose silken fins, and golden scales’ light
Cast upward, through the waves, a ruby glow:
There saw the swan his neck of arched snow,
And oar’d himself along with majesty;	15
Sparkled his jetty eyes; his feet did show
Beneath the waves like Afric’s ebony,
And on his back a fay reclined voluptuously.
Ah! could I tell the wonders of an isle
That in that fairest lake had placed been,	20
I could e’en Dido of her grief beguile;
Or rob from aged Lear his bitter teen:
For sure so fair a place was never seen,
Of all that ever charm’d romantic eye:
It seem’d an emerald in the silver sheen	25
Of the bright waters; or as when on high,
Through clouds of fleecy white, laughs the coerulean sky.
And all around it dipp’d luxuriously
Slopings of verdure through the glossy tide,
Which, as it were in gentle amity,	30
Rippled delighted up the flowery side;
As if to glean the ruddy tears, it tried,
Which fell profusely from the rose-tree stem!
Haply it was the workings of its pride,
In strife to throw upon the shore a gem	35
Outvieing all the buds in Flora’s diadem. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asGolDPXMoo 1.  a) This topic tells us some information about John Keats  b) It is related to his life and poems, and to his firs surviving poem. 2. I choose it because I like his name (John Keats) sounds cool. I spent enough time on it. I was trying to find only most important information and good picture. 3. I understood that John Keats was a talent man, good poet, also now i know that he died in the age of 25  years. 4. I don't think so.. I don't like poetry at all. So I don't think these are my best ideas about this artifact. 5. I need to scale my artifact from -5 to 5. 0 is neutral. I think it's 2. 6. Ha ha. no comments.