John Keats by Farzana Syasya (194931)

John Keats ( Late Romantic Poets)

In this entry, I will talk about a romantic poet named John Keats. The reason why I chose this poet is because during my foundation studies, each class will be named after well-known poets and my class was named after John Keats. At that time, I don’t really who John Keats is and I just thought that his name is quite unique but I never try to search about him in the internet. Fortunately, here I am enrolled in English Literature course and having the opportunity to learn more about him. John Keats was an English Romantic poet along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelly as one of the main figures of romantic poets. He died at the age of 25 caused by tuberculosis.

After doing some research on my own, I found that John Keats wrote a type of lyrical stanza called ode. He became one of the most beloved poets among all English poets through his series of odes. Some of John Keats’s most acclaimed works are “I Stood Tip-toe Upon a Little Hill”, “Sleep and Poetry” and the famous sonnet “On First looking into Chapman’s Homer”. However, John Keats’s reputation grew after his death as his poems are not generally well received by critics in his time. John Keats is also known by his series of Great Odes and “Ode to a Nightingale” is probably the most famous among all. John Keats’s most iconic works are “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, “Ode on Melancholy”, “Ode to Autumn” and “Ode to a Nightingale”. The poem consists of three stanzas and each stanza is ten lines long. The first stanza talks about what not to do, second stanza talks about what to do instead and the third stanza contains the author’s advice. In John Keats’s writings, he used various language techniques such as assonance, alliteration, personification, allusion and anaphora to convey the emotion of the poem effectively.

In 19th centuries, almost every poet knows his poems. In today’s era, it is kind of like how teenage girls nowadays know who One Direction is. I wouldn’t disagree more because in my opinion, his poems are very realistic as it was written from experiences which can make readers left their concerns behind. Besides that, his poems also contain the hard truth of life where we can never run away from the “real life” and we need to find the life that suits us the best. I always wonder how poets came up with such beautiful poems with meaningful contents. Many people know that poets wrote as a way to express themselves. I wish I was born with those talents so that I can express myself better since I tend to keep it all by myself. In my opinion, besides expressing oneself, writing can also help and motivates others who are facing the same problems.

By Farzana Syasya Bt. Faridon (194931)