A LETTER BY JOHN KEATS
John Keats was English poet. He was
born on 31 October 1795 and died on 23 February 1821.
He was a patient of tuberculosis
which became the cause of his death at a very young age.
His like-minded friends were Percy English poets Bysshe Shelley
(1792-1822) and Lord Byron. (1788-1824).
Keats wrote great poetry. Some of
his poems are simple but very meaningful.
He wrote a number of odes which are
immortal. Two of them are Ode To Autumn and Ode On A Grecian Urn .
Ode To Autumn begins with the lines:
Season
of mists and mellow fruitfulness !
Close
bosom-friend of the maturing sun.
Unlike other poets, Keats appreciated
autumn:
“Where
are the songs of Spring? Ay,where are they?
Think
not of them, thou hast thy music too.
A long poem Endymion begins with the
line:
A
thing of beauty is a joy for ever.
The Ode On A Grecian Urn ends with
these lines:
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,---that
is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
The
text of the letter mentioned in the title is as follows. It was addressed to his
friend Benjamin, 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 have never yet been able to perceive how any thing 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.
******
G. R. Kanwal
8th October 2026
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