John Keats Quotes


This living hand, now warm and capable Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold And in the icy silence of the tomb, So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood, So in my veins red life might stream again, And thou be conscience-calm'd. See, here it is-- I hold it towards you.


Citations

Keats, John. "This Living Hand, Now Warm and Capable." The Poems of John Keats, edited by Jack Stillinger, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978, p. 503.

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John Keats
John Keats
  • Born: October 31, 1795
  • Died: February 23, 1821
  • Nationality: English
  • Profession: Poet

John Keats was an English Romantic poet. He was prominent in the second generation of Romantic poets, with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, though his poems were in publication for only four years before he died of tuberculosis at the age of 25. They were not generally well received by critics in his lifetime, but his fame grew after his death, and by the end of the century he had become one of the best beloved English poets, with a strong influence on many writers. Jorge Luis Borges called his first encounter with Keats' work an experience that he felt all of his life. It had a style "heavily loaded with sensualities", notably in the series of odes. It was typical of the Romantics to accentuate extreme emotion through emphasis on natural imagery. Today his poems and letters remain among the most popular and analysed in English literature. Especially acclaimed are "Ode to a Nightingale", "Sleep and Poetry" and the famous sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer".