"On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" is a sonnet written by John Keats when he was just 20 years old. Essentially, it is a poem about poetry itself, describing a reading experience so profound that an entire world seems to come to life. 

The poem talks specifically about a translation of Homer, the Classical Greek poet, by George Chapman, an Elizabethan poet whose translations were more concerned with the reader's experience of the text than loyalty to the original form.  Read here. 

LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI ~ 5^C LINGUISTICO

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, 
       Alone and palely loitering? 
The sedge has withered from the lake, 
       And no birds sing. 

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, 
       So haggard and so woe-begone? 
The squirrel’s granary is full, 
       And the harvest’s done. 

I see a lily on thy brow, 
       With anguish moist and fever-dew, 
And on thy cheeks a fading rose 
       Fast withereth too. 

I met a lady in the meads, 
       Full beautiful—a faery’s child, 
Her hair was long, her foot was light, 
       And her eyes were wild. 

I made a garland for her head, 
       And bracelets too, and fragrant zone; 
She looked at me as she did love, 
       And made sweet moan 

I set her on my pacing steed, 
       And nothing else saw all day long, 
For sidelong would she bend, and sing 
       A faery’s song. 

She found me roots of relish sweet, 
       And honey wild, and manna-dew, 
And sure in language strange she said— 
       ‘I love thee true’. 

She took me to her Elfin grot, 
       And there she wept and sighed full sore, 
And there I shut her wild wild eyes 
       With kisses four. 

And there she lulled me asleep, 
       And there I dreamed—Ah! woe betide!— 
The latest dream I ever dreamt 
       On the cold hill side. 

I saw pale kings and princes too, 
       Pale warriors, death-pale were they all; 
They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci 
       Thee hath in thrall!’ 

I saw their starved lips in the gloam, 
       With horrid warning gaped wide, 
And I awoke and found me here, 
       On the cold hill’s side. 

And this is why I sojourn here, 
       Alone and palely loitering, 
Though the sedge is withered from the lake, 
       And no birds sing.

John Keats 

Here you can  find an analysis of this handsome ballad  which is considered an English classic. It is a narrative of an encounter that causes both pleasure and pain. It avoids simplicity of interpretation despite simplicity of structure. Composed of  twelve stanzas, of only four lines each, with a simple ABCB rhyme scheme, the poem is full of enigmas, and has been the subject of numerous interpretations.
Read here.

MAY

"Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves;

And mid-May's eldest child,

The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,

The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves."

John Keats

from "Ode to a Nightingale"

REMEMBERING JOHN KEATS ON THE BICENTENARY OF HIS DEATH

On 23 February 1821 John Keats died in Rome. A year earlier he had written to his fiancée Fanny Brawne: "If I should die, said I to myself, I have left no immortal work behind me — nothing to make my friends proud of my memory — but I have lov’d the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember’d."

The English poet died of tuberculosis at the age of 25. “I shall soon be laid in the quiet grave – thank God for the quiet grave,” he told his friend Joseph Severn, in whose arms he died. “I can feel the cold earth upon me – the daisies growing over me – O for this quiet – it will be my first.”

Keats gave instructions for his headstone to be engraved with the words “Here lies one whose name was writ in water”, and visitors to Rome’s Protestant Cemetery can still make a pilgrimage to see it today. But far from being “writ in water”, Keats’s words continue to echo, with a host of writing and events lined up to mark the 200th anniversary of his death. Read here.

 https://ksh.roma.it

BRIGHT STAR

Bright Star tells the story of the love affair between John Keats and Fanny Brawne with a classical poise, exquisite craftsmanship and a piercing tenderness. It is Jane Campion’s most fully realised, satisfying achievement in a long while. Read here.

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/bright-star-2009

COMMEMORATING JOHN KEATS

"If I should die," said I to myself, "I have left no immortal work behind me — nothing to make my friends proud of my memory — but I have loved the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remembered."

John Keats died in Rome at just 25 years old  on 23rd February 1821. His grave is notable in that his name is not written anywhere on it. Believing he was dying unknown and forgotten he instead requested it say “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.”

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JOHN KEATS!

John Keats was born on 31 October 1795 in London. In spite of his death at the age of 25, he is one of the greatest English poets and a key figure in the Romantic movement. Read here.

MAY

"Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves;

And mid-May's eldest child,

The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,

The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves."

John Keats

JOHN KEATS, THE POET OF BEAUTY

John Keats was born on 31 October 1795 in Moorgate, London, England, the first child born to Frances Jennings and Thomas Keats. After leaving school in Enfield, Keats went on to apprentice with Dr. Hammond, a surgeon in Edmonton. After his father died in a riding accident, and his mother died of tuberculosis, John and his brothers moved to Hampstead. It was here that Keats met Charles Armitage Brown (1787-1842) who would become a great friend. Remembering his first meeting with him, Brown writes "His full fine eyes were lustrously intellectual, and beaming (at that time!)". Much grieved by his death, Brown worked for many years on his biography, Life of John Keats (1841). In it Brown claims that it was not until Keats read Edmund Spencer's Faery Queen that he realised his own gift for the poetic. Keats was an avid student in the fields of medicine and natural history, but he then turned his attentions to the literary works of such authors as William Shakespeare and Geoffrey Chaucer. Continue reading here.

Here you can find a summary and an analysis of John Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale". 

REVISING JOHN KEATS - 5^C LINGUISTICO

Born in London, England, on October 31, 1795, John Keats devoted his short life to the perfection of poetry marked by vivid imagery, great sensuous appeal and an attempt to express a philosophy through classical legend. In 1818 he went on a walking tour in the Lake District. His exposure and overexertion on that trip brought on the first symptoms of the tuberculosis which ended his life. Continue reading here.

John Keats  -  Life and works

Ode on a Grecian Urn

To Autumn

La Belle Dame Sans Merci

ODE ON A GRECIAN URN

John Keats died young, but he left behind some fine collections of poetry admired most of all for their sensuous language (= language of sense impressions, rich in images appealing to the senses of sight, touch, taste, smell and hearing)  and exaltation of beauty. He now stands among the great Romantic poets.

One of John Keats's most famous poems, Ode on a Grecian Urn, was written in 1819 and published before his death. In this poem the transience of human life merges with the power of the artist and a work of art to make things permanent. The urn has sometimes been regarded as a metaphor for poetry and the role it can serve. 

TO AUTUMN

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells. 

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, –
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breat whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

John Keats (1795 - 1821)

To Autumn was written on 19 September 1819, and published the following year. 

Here  you can find a detailed analysis of the poem.

JOHN KEATS

John Keats was born in 1795 to a lower-middle-class family in London. When he was still young, he lost both his parents. His mother died of tuberculosis, the disease that eventually killed Keats himself. 

He was well educated at a private school in Enfield, where his schoolmaster encouraged him to read and write. In 1810, after leaving school, he was apprenticed to an apothecary-surgeon but he remained a passionate reader. 

In 1815 he left his apprenticeship and became a student at Guy's Hospital, London. However, in 1816  he abandoned the profession of medicine for poetry. Keats's first volume of poems was published in 1817 and was not entirely well  received.

In the summer of 1818, Keats toured the north of England and Scotland, returning home to nurse his brother Tom, who had fallen ill with tuberculosis.  After Tom’s death, in December,   he  moved into a friend’s house in Hampstead, London,  now  known as Keats House.