John Keats: Trending quotes

Source: Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne

Source: Letters of John Keats

Source: Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne

Source: The Complete Poems

Stanza 4
Poems (1820), Ode to a Nightingale

Stanza 6
Poems (1820), Ode to a Nightingale
Source: The Complete Poems
Context: Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain —
To thy high requiem become a sod.

Source: Selected Letters

Source: Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne

Source: Letters of John Keats to His Family and Friends

Letter to Benjamin Bailey (March 13, 1818)
Letters (1817–1820)

Letter to John Taylor (February 27, 1818)
Letters (1817–1820)
Context: In Poetry I have a few axioms, and you will see how far I am from their centre. I think Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity — it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance — Its touches of Beauty should never be halfway thereby making the reader breathless instead of content: the rise, the progress, the setting of imagery should like the Sun come natural to him — shine over him and set soberly although in magnificence leaving him in the luxury of twilight — but it is easier to think what Poetry should be than to write it — and this leads me on to another axiom. That if Poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.

"Bright Star" (1819)
Context: Bright star! would I were stedfast as thou art-
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores.

Letter to G. and F. Keats (December 21, 1817)
Letters (1817–1820)

Source: Complete Poems and Selected Letters

Source: Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne