POETRY STUDY
12 ENGLISH STUDIES
Ms Paine
Study of Poets
1. STUDY OF POETS
 John Keats
 Emily Dickinson
 WB Yeats
 Sylvia Plath
2. FOCUS
 Historical context in which the poets lived
and how it influenced their choice of
subject matter, ideas and techniques
 Key Ideas – central concerns of each poet
such as love, melancholy, innocence
versus experience, death, nature, and the
passing of time.
 Techniques (stylistic features/ language
devices) that each poet liked to employ.
Analysing Poems
– Poetry Grid -
Romanticism
& John Keats
(1795-1821)
What is Romanticism?
Historical Context



INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION – increasing urbanisation as the
population moved from the country to the city to work in
factories and other industries.
FRENCH REVOLUTION (1789) – political change seemed a
possibility in England with the overthrow of the French
Monarchy.
ENLIGHTENMENT – the period in the late 17th and early 18th
Centuries in which reason, rationality, and the scientific
method was primary.
What is Romanticism?
Romanticism as a Response


Romanticism was a response to these catalytic events.
By understanding the Romantic world view, you are able to gain
insight into their poetry.
“Politically it [Romanticism] was inspired by the revolutions in America
and France…Emotionally it expressed an extreme assertion of the self
and the value of the infinite and transcendental. Socially it championed
progressive causes…The stylistic keynote of Romanticism is intensity, and
its watchword is ‘Imagination’”.
(from The Oxford Companion to English Literature ed. Margaret Drabble, 1985)
What is Romanticism?

MUSIC


Ludwig Van Beethoven, Felix
Mendhelssohn, Fran Schubert.
ART


Form of the Responses
John Constable, William Turner, Eugene
Delacroix.
LITERATURE

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the poetry
of William Blake, John Keats, Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth,
Percy Bysse Shelley, Lord Byron.
What is Romanticism?
Primary Concerns
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
VISIONARY EXPERIENCES: They strongly valued a personal
viewpoint that was often imagnitavie and visionary.
EMOTIONS: Intense emotional experiences were very
important, such love, death and melancholy.
INNOCENCE: They admired the sense of innocence found in
children.
NATURE: At a time when nature was threatened by the Industrial
Revolution, it acquired great value.
SOCIAL COMMENTARY: They critiqued and challenged the
dominant social values.
John Keats
Who is John Keats?

“John Keats was an English poet who became one
of the key poets of the English Romantic movement
during the early nineteenth century.”
(<www.wikipedia.org> accessed on 02/06/09)

“In his brief creative career, brought to an end at
twenty-five by his death from tuberculosis, Keats
produced some of the greatest and most enduring
poems of the English language.”
(York Notes Advanced)
John Keats
Keats as a Prototype

Keats is considered as the original prototype of the tragic,
idealised artist who lives a short life and leaves behind a
substantial and influential body of creative work.
ACTIVITY 1:

Pop-culture is full of these tragic geniuses, make a list of at
least five of these figures drawn from the diverse worlds of
music, art and literature.
John Keats
Central Ideas in Keats's Poetry
INFLUENTIAL EVENTS
 “Before he turned fifteen Keats has lost his parents, an infant
brother, an uncle and his grandfather. His apprenticeship with
a surgeon and his training at Guy’s Hospital exposed him to
every kind of human suffering. He nursed his brother Tom until
he died of tuberculosis, so was well aware of the implications
of its symptoms that he himself experienced in the following
four years which preceded his early death”.
(Byron, p. 67)
John Keats
Central Ideas in Keats's Poetry
PERMANENCE & MUTABILITY (TIME)
 Therefore it is not surprising that Keats was concerned with the
paradox of permanence and mutability*.
(mutability* – subject to change)

At the centre of his vision “is the paradox that an awareness of
mortality increases one’s sense of beauty. Mortal life becomes
more valued the more one experiences its fragility and
transience.” (Byron, p. 67-8)
John Keats
Central Ideas in Keats's Poetry
IMAGINATION & TRANSCENDENCE
 His concerns with permanence and mutability are also inter-linked
with his vision of the imagination.
 Keats sees “[t]he imagination providing a link between the real
and the ideal. It allows us to transcend our ‘mortal bars’, to have
a transcendent vision of the joys of immortal existence.” (Byron, p.
68)
John Keats
Reading Keats's Sonnets
John Keats
‘When I have fears that I may cease to be’
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high piled Books, in charact’ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of Chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love! — then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
John Keats
‘Bright Star’
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death -
John Keats
ACTIVITY 2: Analysing Keats’s Sonnets
1.
2.
What key ideas to do you see as being shared
between these two sonnets? Find quotations to
support your point of view.
Now, carefully annotate each poem using the 10 Step
Analysis Grid as a source of direction.
John Keats
Checklist
HAVE YOU CONSIDERED THESE AS YOU READ KEATS’S POETRY?
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.





Subject Matter
Key Ideas (purpose)
Tone (emotion/ mood)
Techniques
Structure
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.





Sensory Appeal
Language
Imagery
Rhythm (movement)
Sounds
DON’T FORGET TO SYNTHESISE AT THE END AND ANSWER THIS QUESTION –
HOW DOES KEATS'S USE POETIC DEVICES TO REVEAL IDEAS?
John Keats
The Sonnet Form



“A poem of 14 lines. Two earliest forms of the sonnet are the Petrachan
and the Elizabethan (as used by Shakespeare and Donne)….Many
sonnets have a volta (or turn of thought) at the end of line 8. Some, for
example, the Elizabethans, have a rhyming couplet at the end”. (Page,
p. 334)
Keats’s sonnets are usually structured into 3 quatrains (of four lines
each) followed by rhyming couplet.
The rhyme scheme of such a sonnet is abab, cdcd, efef for the three
quatrains and then gg for the final couplet.
John Keats
‘When I have fears that I may cease to be’
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high piled Books, in charact’ry,
SUBJECT: The poet is
expressing his fears that
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
death will deny him
fulfilment.
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of Chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love! — then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
John Keats
‘When I have fears that I may cease to be’
- QUATRAIN 1 -
SUBJECT: Keats instantly announces
his concerns with the transient nature
of his own life. He fears that he may
die before he has written all the poems
he wants too.
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high piled Books, in charact’ry*,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;
IMAGERY: Keats employs the imagery of
farming corn to describe the act of
writing. He is comparing it to reaping a
rich harvest.
charact’ry* - writing
John Keats
‘When I have fears that I may cease to be’
REPETITION: Throughout
the poem, the words
“When” and “And” are
repeated in the quatrains
linking each section of the
poem and giving the sonnet
a sense of continuity.
- QUATRAIN 2 -
SUBJECT: In the second quatrain, Keats expands
upon these fears with a specific reference that
he may never trace all the “high romance” he
sees symbolised in the heavens.
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of Chance;
STRUCTURE: Keats’s use of the sonnet structure is very
traditional in this poem. Each line is clearly end-stopped
as it coincides with the end of an idea or clause.
John Keats
‘When I have fears that I may cease to be’
- QUATRAIN 3 -
TONE: is light.
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love! — then on the shore
SUBJECT: In the third quatrain he
addresses a woman whom he met
in a brief encounter to consider
what he may also be prevented
from ever experiencing love.
REPETITION: of “And” clearly links
this quatrain to the one before.
IMAGERY: helps to create the
final central image, and leads
into the couplet.
John Keats
‘When I have fears that I may cease to be’
- FINAL RHYMING COUPLET Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.
SUBJECT: “The poet presents
an image of himself standing
alone on the shore of the wide
world with a all personal
ambitions and concerns
erased from his mind by the
immensity of what he
contemplates.” (Byron, p. 18)
TONE: of these last
two lines is much
heavier then the
lightness suggested
by the “faery
creature” earlier on.
KEY IDEAS: Keats is
questioning the
permanency of his
own existence and
whether his death
will deny him
fulfilment.
John Keats
‘Bright Star’




This is a less conventional sonnet then ‘When I have fears
that I may cease to be’
Keats is addressing a star as a symbol of the permanence he
desires.
This sonnet is traditionally associated with Fanny Brawne,
the great love of Keats’s life, who he was never able to
marry due to his poor health.
The sonnet is a extended sentence with a difficult syntax in
which Keats explores the tension between the cold,
permanent star and his mutable, but warm love.
Fanny Brawne
John Keats
‘Bright Star’
- OCTAVE (SET OF EIGHT LINES) This technique is called an APOSTROPHE
(a figure of speech) in which a poet
addresses an absent or inanimate sprit or
force – in this case, a star.
STRUCTURE/ IMAGERY: The
octave focuses on the image of a
bright star that is traditionally a
symbol of permanence. The poet
envies the star and its
“steadfastness”. However the
star is portrayed as a cold,
remote observer of the “earth’s
human shores”. The words
highlighted in pink help create
this impression.
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priest-like task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors -
‘Bright Star’
John Keats
STRUCTURE/ SUBJECT: The beginning of this sestet in
the second half of the sonnet is a classic VOLTA (turn
of thought). Keats signals this change through the
choice of ‘No’. Keats is rejecting the permanency of
the cold, aloof star for his “fair love”.
- SESTET (SET OF SIX LINES) REPETITION: of “still” links
the beginning of the sestet
with final rhyming couplet.
No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death KEY IDEAS: In this final sestet, the paradox of the permanent, beautiful
star compared to the transient, living beauty of his fair love is exposed. For
the poet to continue experiencing his love he must be “awake for ever in
sweet unrest…or else swoon to death” and permanency.
SOUND/ TONE:
The alliteration
and assonance
of this line adds
to the tone of
tenderness.
This RHYMING COUPLET is
particularly effective due to
the striking contrast
between “breath” and
“death”.
REFERENCES
Page, Geoff. 80 Great Poems: From Chaucer to Now. UNSW Press, 2006.
Byron, Glennis. John Keats – Selected Poems. (York Notes Advanced),
CUP, 2006