约翰·济慈 | |||||
Birth Place: | 伦敦 | ||||
Death Place: | 意大利 | ||||
Read works of John Keats at 诗海 |
John Keats was born in 1795 at 85 Moorgate in London, where his father, Thomas Keats, was an hostler. The pub is now called 'Keats at the Globe', only a few yards from Moorgate station. Keats was baptised at St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate and lived happily for the first seven years of his life. The beginnings of his troubles occurred in 1804, when his father died from a fractured skull after falling from his horse. A year later, in 1805, Keats' grandfather died. His mother, Frances Jennings Keats, remarried soon afterwards, but quickly left the new husband and moved herself and her four children (a son had died in infancy) to live with Keats's grandmother, Alice Jennings. There, Keats attended a school that first instilled in him a love of literature. In 1810, however, his mother died of tuberculosis, leaving him and his siblings in the custody of their grandmother.
Keats's grave in RomeKeats's grandmother appointed two guardians to take care of her new "charges", and these guardians removed Keats from his old school to become a surgeon's apprentice at Thomas Hammond's apothecary shop in Edmonton (now part of the London Borough of Enfield). This continued until 1814, when, after a fight with his master, he left his apprenticeship and became a student at Guy's Hospital (now part of King's College London). During that year, he devoted more and more of his time to the study of literature. Keats travelled to the Isle of Wight in the spring of 1819, where he spent a week. Later that year he stayed in Winchester. It was here that Keats wrote Isabella, St. Agnes' Eve and Lamia. Parts of Hyperion and the five-act poetic tragedy Otho The Great were also written in Winchester.
Following the death of his grandmother, he soon found his brother, Tom Keats, entrusted to his care. Tom was suffering, as his mother had, from tuberculosis. Finishing his epic poem "Endymion", Keats left to work in Scotland and Ireland with his friend Charles Armitage Brown. However, he too began to show signs of tuberculosis infection on that trip, and returned prematurely. When he did, he found that Tom's condition had deteriorated, and that Endymion had, as had Poems before it, been the target of much abuse from the critics. On 1 December 1818, Tom Keats died from his disease, and John Keats moved again, to live in Brown's house in Hampstead. There he lived next door to Fanny Brawne, who had been staying there with her mother. He then quickly fell in love with Fanny. However, it was overall an unhappy affair for the poet; Keats's ardor for her seemed to bring him more vexation than comfort. The later (posthumous) publication of their correspondence was to scandalise Victorian society. In the diary of Fanny Brawne was found only one sentence regarding the separation: "Mr. Keats has left Hampstead." Fanny's letters to Keats were, as the poet had requested, destroyed upon his death. However, in 1937, a collection of 31 letters written by Fanny Brawne to Keats's sister, Frances, were published by Oxford University Press. These letters revealed the depth of Brawne's feelings toward Keats and in many ways attempted to redeem her rather promiscuous reputation, it is arguable whether or not they succeeded.
Life and Death masks, RomeThis relationship was cut short when, by 1820, Keats began showing worse signs of the disease that had plagued his family. On the suggestion of his doctors, he left the cold airs of London behind and moved to Italy with his friend Joseph Severn. Keats moved into a house, now a museum dedicated to his life and work, The Keats-Shelley House, on the Spanish Steps, in Rome, where despite attentive care from Severn and Dr. John Clark, the poet's health rapidly deteriorated. He died in 1821 and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome. His last request was to be buried under a tombstone reading, "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." His name was not to appear on the stone. Despite these requests, however, Severn and Brown also added the epitaph: "This Grave contains all that was mortal, of a YOUNG ENGLISH POET, who on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his heart, at the Malicious Power of his enemies, desired these words to be Engraven on his Tomb Stone" along with the image of a lyre with broken strings.
The Spanish Steps, Rome, Italy, seen from Piazza di Spagna. John Keats died in the house in the right foreground, which is now a museum.Shelley blamed his death on an article published shortly before in the Quarterly Review, with a scathing attack on Keats's Endymion. The offending article was long believed to have been written by William Gifford, though later shown to be the work of John Wilson Croker. Keats's death inspired Shelley to write the poem Adonais.'; Byron later composed a short poem on this theme using the phrase "snuffed out by an article." However Byron, far less admiring of Keats's poetry than Shelley and generally more cynical in nature, was here probably just as much poking fun at Shelley's interpretation as he was having a dig at his old fencing partners the critics. (see below, Byron's other less than serious poem on the same subject).
The largest collection of Keats's letters, manuscripts, and other papers is in the Houghton Library at Harvard University. Other collections of such material can be found at the British Library; Keats House, Hampstead; The Keats-Shelley House, Rome; and the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York.
Popular references
Portrait from Keats' grave, in Rome.
In written works
F. Scott Fitzgerald refers to a line in "Ode to a Nightingale" in the title of his novel Tender Is The Night.
Arthur Ransome uses two references from "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" in his children's books, the Swallows and Amazons series.
P.G. Wodehouse in his review of the first Flashman novel that came to his attention used a phrase from "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer": "Now I understand what that ‘when a new planet swims into his ken’ excitement is all about."
J. D. Salinger, in his novella Seymour: An Introduction, introduces the reader to a certain haiku, the authorship of which he attributes to his most complex fictional creation, Seymour Glass. The haiku reads as follows: "John Keats/ John Keats/ John/ Please put your scarf on." (Tuberculosis is a condition aggravated by cold weather.)
In allusion to Keat's complaint to Sir Isaac Newton for destroying the beauty of the rainbow, Richard Dawkins names his book "Unweaving the rainbow"
Dan Simmons's science-fiction novels of the Hyperion Cantos feature two characters with the cloned body of John Keats, as well as his personality (reconstructed and programmed into an AI). Some of the main themes of these novels, as well as their names, draw upon "Hyperion" and "Endymion".
A quote from Keats appears in Phillip Pullman's novel The Subtle Knife, "...capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason -" (from a 21 Dec. 1817 letter by Keats on his theory of negative capability).
The popular teen series Gossip Girl mention Keats throughout the novels as the male protagonist Daniel Humphrey's poetic hero and is referenced numerous times by the character.
Robert Frost, in his poem Choose Something Like a Star, alludes to John Keats' poem Bright Star. The eighteenth line reads as follows: "And steadfast as Keats' Eremite."
In 1977 author Anthony Burgess ("A Clockwork Orange", "Napoleon Symphony") recreated Keats' last days in Rome in a book entitled "ABBA ABBA".
Ann Brashares named one of her chapter in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on," from Ode to a Grecian Urn
In performed works
Keats was mentioned in The Smiths' song "Cemetry Gates": "Keats and Yeats are on your side while Wilde is on mine".
In pop singer Natasha Bedingfield's 2005 single "These Words", Keats is mentioned along with Byron and Shelley.
Keats in Hampstead, a play written and directed by James Veitch and based on the poet's time at Wentworth Place, premiered in the garden of Keats House in July 2007.
A radio play The Mask Of Death on the final days of John Keats in Rome written by the Indian English poet Gopi Kottoor captures the last days of the young poet as revealed through his circle of friends (Severn), his poetry and letters.
Hammersmith rock band Tellison adapt J.D. Salinger's haiku in their song "Architects", with the lyric "John Keats, John Keats, John Keats, John, John Keats, John, Please put a scarf on".
On their 2005 album The Runners Four, the band Deerhoof included a song titled "Spirit Ditties Of No Tone," referencing a line in Keats' poem, "Ode on a Grecian Urn".
Two films about Keats's life are in pre-production as of July 2007:
a period drama about Keats's romance with Fanny Brawne titled Bright Star, set for release in 2008, is directed by Jane Campion and stars Ben Whishaw and Abbie Cornish in the lead roles.
a mockumentary 'grunge' musical based on Keats's letters and set in Seattle at the beginning of the 1990s, titled Negative Capability, directed by Daniel Gildark.
Dawson Leery from Dawson's Creek quotes Keats' poem "Ode on A Grecian Urn"- "beauty is truth, truth beauty" in Season 2, Episode "The All-Nighter"
Keats line from Book 1 of Endymion is referenced in the film "White Men Can't Jump" when a character admires a shot and says "A thing of beauty is a joy forever. My man John Keats said that".
Bibliography
Addressed to Haydon text
Addressed to the Same text
Asleep! O sleep a little while, white pearl! text
A Song About Myself
Bards of Passion and of Mirth text
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art (1819)
Calidore (a fragment)
The Day Is Gone, And All Its Sweets Are Gone
Dedication. To Leigh Hunt, Esq.
A Dream, After Reading Dante's Episode Of Paolo And Francesca text
A Draught of Sunshine
Endymion: A Poetic Romance (1817)
Epistle to John Hamilton Reynolds
Epistle to My Brother George
The Eve of Saint Mark
The Eve of St. Agnes (1819) text
The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream (1817)
Fancy (poem)
Fill For Me A Brimming Bowl text
Fragment of an Ode to Maia
Give Me Women, Wine, and Snuff
Happy Is England! I Could Be Content
Hither, Hither, Love
How Many Bards Gild The Lapses Of Time!
The Human Seasons
Hymn To Apollo
Hyperion (1818)
I had a dove
I stood tip-toe upon a little hill
If By Dull Rhymes Our English Must Be Chain'd
Imitation of Spenser text
In Drear-Nighted December
Isabella or The Pot of Basil (1818) text
Keen, fitful gusts are whisp’ring here and there
La Belle Dame sans Merci (1819) text
Lamia (1819)
Lines (poem)
Lines on Seeing a Lock of Milton's Hair
Lines on The Mermaid Tavern
Meg Merrilies
Modern Love (Keats)
O Blush Not So!
O Solitude! If I Must With Thee Dwell
Ode (Keats)
Ode on a Grecian Urn (1819) text
Ode on Indolence (1819)
Ode on Melancholy (1819) text
Ode to a Nightingale (1819) text
Ode to Apollo
Ode to Fanny
Ode to Psyche (1819)
Oh! how I love, on a fair summer's eve
Old Meg (1818)
On Death
On Fame text
On First Looking into Chapman's Homer (1816) text
On Leaving Some Friends At An Early Hour
On Peace (1814) text
On receiving a curious Shell
On Seeing the Elgin Marbles for the First Time
On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again
On the Grasshopper and Cricket
On the Sea text
On The Sonnet
The Poet (a fragment)
A Prophecy - To George Keats in America
Robin Hood
Sharing Eve's Apple
Sleep and Poetry
A Song of Opposites
Specimen of an Induction to a Poem
Staffa
Stanzas
Think Not of It, Sweet One
This Living Hand
To —
To a Cat
To A Friend Who Sent Me Some Roses
To a Lady seen for a few Moments at Vauxhall
To A Young Lady Who Sent Me A Laurel Crown
To Autumn
To Ailsa Rock
To Autumn (1819) text
To Byron text
To Charles Cowden Clarke
To Chatterton
To Fanny
To G.A.W. (Georgiana Augusta Wylie)
To George Felton Mathew
To Georgiana Augusta Wylie
To Haydon
To Homer
To Hope
To John Hamilton Reynolds
To Kosciusko
To My Brother
To My Brothers
To one who has been long in city pent
To Sleep
To Solitude
To Some Ladies
To the Nile
Two Sonnets on Fame
When I have fears that I may cease to be (1818) text
Where Be Ye Going, You Devon Maid?
Where's the Poet?
Why did I laugh tonight?
Woman! when I behold thee flippant, vain
Written in Disgust of Vulgar Superstition
Written on a Blank Space
Written on a Summer Evening
Written on the Day that Mr Leigh Hunt Left Prison
Written Upon the Top of Ben Nevis
You say you love
Further reading
The Complete Poetical Works and Letters of John Keats, ed. Horace Elisha Scudder, Boston: Riverside Press (1899) full text available through Google Books
The Complete Poetical Works of John Keats, ed. H. Buxton Forman. Oxford University Press (1907) full text available through Google Books
The Letters of John Keats, 1814-1821, Volumes 1 and 2, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, Harvard University Press (1958)
The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger, Harvard University Press (1978)
Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger, Harvard University Press (1982)
John Keats: Poetry Manuscripts at Harvard, a Facsimile Edition, ed. Jack Stillinger, Harvard University Press (1990)
_Select_ed Letters of John Keats, ed. Grant F. Scott, Harvard University Press (2002)
References
^ The Complete Poetical Works of John Keats edited by Horace Elisha Scudder, Boston: Riverside Press, 1899. p. 277
^ Church Street, Edmonton, London Retrieved April 02, 2008
^ A.N.Wilson's review in The Telegraph 15 August 2005
^ Quoted on current UK imprint of Flashman novels as cover blurb.
Goslee, Nancy (1985), Uriel's Eye: Miltonic Stationing and Statuary in Blake, Keats and Shelley, University of Alabama Press, ISBN 0817302433
Jones, Michael (1984), "Twilight of the Gods: The Greeks in Schiller and Lukacs", Germanic Review 59 (2): 49-56.
Lachman, Lilach (1988), "History and Temporalization of Space: Keats's Hyperion Poems.", Proceedings of the XII Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, edited by Roger Bauer and Douwe Fokkema (Munich, Germany): 159-164.
Keats, John & Stillinger, Jack (1982), Complete Poems, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, ISBN 0674154304
Wolfson, Susan J., The Questioning Presence., Ithaca, New York, ISBN 0801419093