Research Paper On John Keats

John Keats’: Beauty in Death John Keats played a huge role in Romanticism poetry in the 1800s. He used themes like dating back to the classics, death, and beauty. John Keats went to school to become a doctor, which wasn’t as prestige of a career as it is today. He switched because he felt a calling toward writing, and did so very fluently. Although, when Keats was around 24, he figured out he was dying, which is a reason why he referenced and wrote about how there is still beauty in death. The image of beauty in death is one of the biggest ideas Keats’ wrote about. John Keats referenced the classic writers and the classic poems because he taught himself by reading lots of books about ancient Greece and ancient Rome. Also, he went to museums

Also, John Keats lost his parents at a young age, and his brother of tuberculosis. Needless to say he knew how fatal the disease was. In one of his more disheartening poems, “Ode on Melancholy”, the whole first paragraph involves lots of ways to die. For example, it used the words like “Wolf’s-bane”, “nightshade”, “poisonous wine”, and the river “Lethe” (Keats, paragraph). The first three words deal with poison, where Wolfs-bane and nightshade are poisonous plants. But the most important reference to death is Lethe, which is in Greek mythology and is the river of forgetfulness in Hades. This most obvious connection to death, because Hades is the Greek underworld and Keats writes in the “Ode to Melancholy” to not forget your mortal life. This brings it back to Keats’ bigger theme which is beauty in death, and how you should never forget where you came

How bad things can be happening around us, but there is still beauty in the world. He believed that although we must die eventually, we can choose to spend our time alive in aesthetic revelry, looking at beautiful objects and landscapes. This was shown in the poem, “Ode on a Grecian urn” because of the beauty in the battle scenes. In “Ode to a Nightingale”, Keats writes “Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!” (Keats, line 61). This shows how we were born for death, but rather to find beauty in the world around us. Also, the message of the immortal bird is a weird one because it is not really clear about what is it talking about, but personally it seems like it is talking about humans. It is most likely depicting how humans were not born for death, rather to live their life. This relates back to the theme of beauty in death, where there is always beauty around