John Keats
Links:
- http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/keats.html. This website offers an introduction to Keates including poetic themes, odes, imagery, paintings and related sites. It was last updated August 27, 2004.
- http://www.victorianweb.org/previctorian/keats/keatsov.html. Website details varied information on Keats. Updated in 2000.
- http://www.john-keats.com/. This site offers a variety of facts and works about John Keats. It provides detailed descriptions of his life and poems that can easily serve as resources.
- http://englishhistory.net/keats.html. Just as the previous site, this one allows the reader to view a number of different accounts of his life and provides primary resources including pictures. In addition to this, his copious amount of poems and letters are offered in plain view.
- http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/rom.html Has a lot of information about Romanticism. Modified in 2004. A link from http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/keats.html#rom, another good site about Keats.
- http://www.literaryhistory.com/19thC/KEATS.htm. Provides links with literary criticism and bibliographies. Last updated on March 29th, 2006. Non-profit.
- http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/features/keats/keats.html. From the British Library. Has more information about Keats himself than his work, but it is very informative and interesting. It has a picture of his house in Rome on the first page. It also has links to letters that he wrote, and some specific poems that he wrote. Also has some media of other authors reading his work.
- http://englishhistory.net/keats.html. Has both the biography and examples of John Keats' work. The site cites its sources as well as giving critics of John Keats.
Historical Context:
Romanticism was a reaction to Classicism, the Age of Reason movement in the arts that attempted to duplicated the order and balance in the art of Greece and Rome. While Classiscism stressed reason over emotion and social concerns over personal ones, Romantic writers stressed personal experience and were often highly emotional. Among the earliest Romantic writers were the British poet William Wordsworth and the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
The qualities of Romanticism vary from place to place, and few Romantic writers exhibit all of them. But there are some characteristics that can give us a general definition of Romanticism:
* a profound love of nature;
* a focus on the self and the individual;
* a facination with the supernatural, the mysterious and the gothic;
* a yearning for the picturesque and the exotic
* a deep-rooted idealism; and
* a passionate nationalism, or love of country
Romantic writers reveal with emotion their own personal visions and delve deeply into the individual personalities of their characters. Poe is representitive of this strain of Romanticism, for he often displays the tortured minds and hearts of inward-looking characters (Montresor). Poe also demonstrates a fascination with the gothic, the dark, irrational side of the imagination.
NB: the above was copied and gleaned from Literary Movements for Students; David Galens, Project Editor, Gale Publishing. I highly recommend this work and the other works in the series.