John Keats
John Keats (1795–1821) was an English Romantic poet whose sensuous language, formal skill, and major odes shaped his lasting literary reputation.
Romanticism: An artistic and intellectual movement emphasizing emotion, imagination, nature, and individual experience. Keats was a major second-generation English Romantic poet.
Ode to a Nightingale: A 1819 ode in which a speaker contemplates mortality, imaginative escape, and the song of a nightingale. It stages Keats’s conflict between mortal suffering and poetic transport.
Edmund Spenser: An English poet of the sixteenth century, best known for “The Faerie Queene.” Spenser’s verse strongly influenced Keats’s early poetic style.
Fanny Brawne: An Englishwoman engaged to John Keats, whose letters to her survive as a record of their relationship. Keats’s love for Brawne shaped his late life and appears in his letters and poems.
Victorian poetry: Poetry written during the reign of Queen Victoria, from 1837 to 1901. Victorian poets inherited and reworked Keats’s sensuous style and formal practice.
Ode: A formal lyric poem that addresses or meditates on a subject in an elevated style. Several of Keats’s most celebrated poems use the ode form.
Ode on a Grecian Urn: A 1819 poem meditating on art, time, beauty, and the figures depicted on an imagined Greek urn. Its still images sharpen Keats’s questions about art’s permanence and limits.
Leigh Hunt: An English essayist, poet, and editor who promoted liberal literature and supported younger writers. Hunt introduced Keats to literary networks and helped publish his early work.
Tom Keats: John Keats’s younger brother, who died of tuberculosis in 1818. Tom’s illness and death deepened Keats’s exposure to grief and mortality.
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood: A nineteenth-century British art movement that sought vivid detail and renewed engagement with earlier artistic traditions. Its artists and poets admired Keats’s rich imagery and medieval subjects.