JohnKeats约翰济慈

On the surface, this ode is about the Grecian Urn, but we can fairly say it is a commentary on nature & art, for art has the power to preserve intense human experiences, so that they may go on being enjoyed by men from generation to generation. Pleasure in life cannot be protected from change, while artifact can remain intact. The Ode consists of 5 stanzas, the first four stanzas describing a pastoral scene on the urn, & the last epitomizing the relation of the timeless ideal world in art to the woeful actual world.

His Position in English Literature

Known as a sensuous poet.(给人以美的享受的诗人） A voice through which beauty expresses itself. He is, like Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth, one of the indisputable great English poets. And his mighty poems will no doubt have a lasting place in the history of English literature.
Odes




The modern form of the ode dates from the Renaissance; like the Latin ode it is pure poetry, not intended for musical accompaniment. The earliest English odes include the Epithalamion and the Prothalamion, or marriage hymns, by the 16th-century poet Edmund Spenser. English writers of odes in the 17th century included Ben Jonson and Andrew Marvell, who wrote in the Horatian mode, and John Milton, whose ode “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”

It shows the contrast between the permanence of art & the transience of human passion. The poet has absorbed himself into the timeless beautiful scenery on the antique Grecian Urn : the lovers, musicians & worshippers on the Urn exist simultaneously & for ever in their intensity of joy. They are unaffected by time, stilled in expectation. This is at once the glory & the limitation of the world conjured up by an object of art. The urn celebrates but simplifies intuitions of ecstasy by seeming to deny our painful knowledge of transience & suffering.
John Keats
(1795—1821)
John Keats

1795-1821 English romantic poet. He is considered one of the greatest English poets.
Keats’s Life



Came from a poor background, son of a liverstable keeper, lost his parents early in life, and was apprenticed at 15 to a doctor. Had no formal education or literary training. Made up for deficiency with voracious reading. Read well in Greek and Elizabethan literature, and had Homer, Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton among his literary passions.
Major works


Long poems:
Endymion《恩底弥翁》 Isabella《伊莎贝拉》 The Eve of St. Agnes《圣爱格尼斯之夜》 Lamia 《莱米亚》 Hyperion 《赫披里昂》


Short lyrics: four odes, his most important
The Form




Each stanza is 10 lines long, metered in a relative precise iambic pentameter, and divided into two part rhyme scheme, the last 3 lines of which are variable. The first 7 lines of each stanza follow an ABABCDE rhyme scheme, but the second occurrences of the CDE sound do not follow the same order. In stanza1, lines 7 through 10 are rhymed DCE; in stanza2, CED; in stanzas 3 and 4, CDE; and in stanza 5 ,DCE, just as in stanza1. The two-part rhyme scheme creates the sense of a twopart thematic structure as well. The first 4 lines of each stanza roughly define the subject of the stanza, and the last 6 roughly explicate or develop it.

Hyperion The unfinished long epic includes two fragments, Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, modeling on Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dante’s Purgatorio in The Divine Comedy separately. Its theme is the conflict between the old and the new, and the story is derived from Greek mythology. The poem describes the struggle for power in heaven, the displacement of the old Titans headed by Saturn by the new generation of gods, the Olympians headed by Zeus.
Misfortunes befell him ruthlessly. His brother died, and he contracted the terminal disease---tuberculosis. He loved a young girl, Fanny Browne, but had to cut off ties with her because of his illness and experienced the worse emotional torment for a human being. Later in life he went to Italy to improve his health. He was slightly over 25 years old when he died. He told his friend Joseph Severn that he wanted on his grave just the line.
Ode on a Grecian Urn《希腊古瓮颂》 Ode on Melancholy《哀感》 Ode to a Nightingale《夜莺颂》 To Autumn《秋颂》

) Endymion Endymion was a poem based on the Greek myth of Endymion & the moon goddess. In this poem, Keats described his imagination in an enchanted atmosphere-a lovely moon-lit world where human love & ideal beauty were merged into one. Endymion marked a transitional phase in Keats's poetry, though he himself was not satisfied with it.