1. AO1: key vocabulary & terms
AO2: key poems
A03: key context links
A05: key critical views
Trepidation
Anxiety
Liberty
Spontaneity
Distress
Transcendence
Sublime
Vast
Mortality
Sorrow
Longing
Alienation
Sensual
Rich
Exotic
Sensory
Pathos
Radical
Spiritual force
Aesthetic
Devotion
revolutionary
Imitation of Spenser
On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
On Seeing the Elgin Marbles
On the Seat
On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Isabella
On Visiting the Tomb of Burns
The Eve of St Agnes
La Belle Dame sans Merci
To Sleep
Ode to Psyche
Ode to Grecian Urn
Ode to a Nightingale
Ode on Melancholy
Lamia
Bright Star!
To Autumn
The Romantics highlighted the healing power of the imagination- they believed it enabled people to transcend their troubles and their circumstances
They wanted to regenerate mankind’s spirituality
The Enlightenment view was more like a mirror – works of literature reflected and commented on the world around them. Interested in the relationship between art and the universe.
Romanticism was more like a lamp. The artists were the lamps, spilling out their soul to help illuminate the world. Literature became an exploration of the relationship between art and the artist’s journey.
They admired nature’s vastness, mortality, power and beauty
Sublime: elicits feelings of admiration and fear
For a thorough summary of Keats’ life:
TB was prevalent and many died from it. Signs: pale, emancipated, aversion to sunlight, coughing up blood, fatigue, fever, etc.
Keats’ poetry was highly criticised for most of his life and he was only valued after his death
His epitaph says: 'Here lies one whose name was writ in water'
Keats poets are fanciful dreaming tea-drinkers… so back to the shop Mr John, back to plaster and pills: Lockhart
Keats uses the female figure to represent a visionary experience”: Wolfson
Keats’s ambiguous depiction of Madeline has not attracted the attention it deserves… she appears variously as an innocent dreamers, an object of rap devotion… of ridicule, and a tart: Wolfson
His deepest anxieties take shape in confrontations with power in a female form: Wolfson
TEOSA was written in the first confident flush of [Keats’s] love for Fanny Brawne: Ward
Lamia has lavishly sensual descriptions, yet gives way to bitterness and sarcasm: Motion
Lamia embodies two kinds of elegy (like a funeral song) its’ to do with the imagination… the other is person… it is a prelude to death itself: Motion
Lamia proves that Keats cannot do without Fanny: Motion
Ode to a Nightingale is about his ambivalent feelings about Fanny: Motion
OTAN his reference to the hungry generations may have depended on his jaundiced view of contemporary politics… compel us to read the poem as an account of historical tribulations: Motion
Tragic
Insight
Beauty
Divine
Celestial
Mythical
Ambivalence
Ambiguous
antinomies
Enchanting
Haunting

2. AO1: key vocabulary & terms AO2: key language & dramatic techniques
A03: key context links
A05: key critical views
Trepidation
Anxiety
Liberty
Spontaneity
Distress
Transcendence
Sublime
Vast
Mortality
Sorrow
Longing
Alienation
Sensual
Rich
Exotic
Sensory
Pathos
Radical
Spiritual force
Aesthetic
Devotion
revolutionary
Rich, exotic and sensory imagery
Metaphorical prose
Ambiguous tone (Negative Capability)
Synaesthesia
Natural imagery
Mythical imagery
Semantic fields
Pathetic fallacy
Musical tone
Cynical tone
Dreamy tone
Spenserian stanza
Ballad: simple poem, usually a story, usually medieval
Sonnets: usually 14 lines with iambic pentameter
Odes: usually a formal, often ceremonious lyric poem that addresses and often celebrates a person, place, thing, or idea.
Keats’ father died in 1804 in a riding accident
Mother died to TB in 1810
1810 Keats left home to train as an apprentice surgeon and apothecary
1814 writes Imitation of Spencer
1815 becomes a dresser (surgeon’s assistant)
1817 Hunt begins publishing and showing Keats’ poetry (he becomes associated with the Young Poets/Romantics)
1817 Sees Elgin Marbles and is inspired
1818 Keats’ poetry is attacked and begins his walking tour of Scotland with Charles Brown (when critics believe he became ill). Returns to find his brother, Tom, ill with TB; he later dies
Probably met Fanny Brawne about a month before his brother dies
1819 writes a lot of his major works, such as the Odes and La Belle and Eve of St Agnes
Later that year (September), Autumn is one of his last poems written
December he gets engaged to Brawne
February his illness gets worse and Brawne refuses to end their engagement. June it gets worse again
July his dr orders that he go to Italy
1821 Keats dies in Rome, Spain
Many of the odes are ambitious to transmute or escape history: Motion
Keats was concerned with poetry and its power over the passion and imaginations, its moral bearings: Motion
Keats’ voice is in all her music (nature’s): Shelley
(Poems are) attractive because of their uncertainties and doubts without an irritable reaching after fact and reason: Stillinger
Truth is founded on a knowledge of past suffering: Motion
Pain is an integral part of Keats’ vision of the world: Smith
Keats portrays Death as somehow beautiful: Stillinger
Keats uses a female figure to represent visionary experience. His anxieties are revealed through confrontations with power in a female form: Wolfson
OTAN shows his experience as a doctor… the weariness, the fever, and the fret… his depression in 1819: Motion
Tragic
Insight
Beauty
Divine
Celestial
Mythical
Ambivalence
Ambiguous
antinomies
Enchanting
Haunting
Ecstatic