A LETTER BY JOHN KEATS
The English poet John Keats was born
on 31 October 1795 in London and died on
23 February 1821 in Rome, Italy. He was a patient of tuberculosis. As a poet,
he belonged to the second generation of romantic poets, along with Lord Byron (1788-1824)
and Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822). He was also influenced by John Milton, Edmund Spenser,
William Hazlitt and Virgil.
Keats was a poet of beauty. He said:
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever. The last two lines of His Ode On A Grecian
Urn ends with the following two lines:
Beauty
is truth, truth beauty –that is all
Ye
know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Keats believed in the permanence of
art and according to him art is a form of beauty and truth.
One
of his most remarkable letters reads is quoted below. It was addressed to his
close friend, confidant, and correspondent Benjamin Bailey (1791-1853) on
November 22, 1817.
…I
am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the
truth of Imagination ----What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth
---whether it existed before or not ---for I have the same Idea of all our
Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential beauty…The
Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream ---he awoke and found it truth. I
am the more zealous in this affair, because I have never yet been able to
perceive how anything can be known for truth by consequitive reasoning…we shall
enjoy ourselves here after by having what we called happiness on Earth repeated in a finer tone and so
repeated----And yet such a fate can only befall those who delight in sensation
rather than hunger as you do after Truth----Adam’s dream will do here and seems
to be a conviction that Imagination and its empyreal reflection is the same as
human Life and its spiritual repetition.”
Finally,
here are some of his famous quotes :
·
“Heard
melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.”
·
The
poetry of earth is never dead.
·
Nothing
ever becomes real till it is experienced.
·
I
could be martyred for my religion. Love is my religion and I could die for
that.
·
In
all things of nature there is something of the marvellous.
·
Nature
never hurries. Atom by atom, little by little, she achieves her work.
·
Knowing
tees, I understand the meaning of patience, knowing grass I can appreciate
persistence.
*******
G. R. Kanwal
1st March 2026
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