Keats

John Keats (1795-1821)

Forse qualcuno di voi ha guardato il film "Bright Star" ieri sera sulla Rai.

Se così fosse vi lascio qualche informazione relativa al protagonista, poiché si tratta di uno scrittore inglese, precursore dell' Estetismo, anche se non può essere considerato totalmente un esteta dal momento che per lui la bellezza ha anche scopi morali.

Qui di seguito troverete notizie relative alla sua vita e alle sue opere e qualche video del film trovato su youtube.

Buona lettura!....e buona visione!

Keats was born in London. His father died when he was only eight years old, and his mother died when he was fourteen. After his mother's death he started a medical training, and he began also to be interested in poetry. He was encouraged by one of his former teachers who introduced him to some important writers in English Romanticism.

In 1817 he published his first collection of poetry. One year later he met and fell in love with Fanny Browne, but they coludn't get married because of his financial situation and failing health. In that period he published Endymion, attacked by conservative critics, Hyperion, The Eve of St. Agnes, La Belle Dame sans Merci, odes and sonnets.

In 1820 he had his first hemmorrhage of the lungs and he was advised by doctors to travel to a warmer climate. He went to Italy, stopped in Naples and then in Rome, where he took a room in Piazza di Spagna. There he died in 1821 at the early age of twenty-five. He was buried in the protestant Cemetery in Rome. No name was engraved on his tombstone, as he wished, but only the words: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water".

The most important features and themes of his poetry are:

• nature: it is a source of poetry, joy and beauty;
• beauty: in it he finds everlasting joy and the only consolation left to man. He thinks that even if the artist dies, the beauty he has created will live on. He believs in physical beauty, being aware that it is decaying and temporary, and in spiritual beauty, which is eternal and immortal. This is the reason why he is considered the forerunner of the Aesthetic Movement;
• poetry as a refuge: through it man can escape a world dominated by science and facts, and can achieve eternity or some forms of divinity;
• imagination: we need imagination to find beauty in things or to create it and make it last forever;
• admiration of classical antiquity, which was for him a source of inspiration.
• admiration for the Middle Ages.