John Keats 课用.ppt

John Keats Life: John Keats was born in 1795 in London. Before John was fifteen, both his parents died and his guardian, a merchant, took him from school and bound him as an apprentice to a surgeon. For five years he served his apprenticeship and for two years more he was surgeons helper in the hospitals. But he early contracted a love of poetry under the influence of his young teacher Charles Cowden Clarke (1787-1877), who gave him a copy of The Fairy Queen. He made friends with Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt and Shelley in London and published some poems in Hunts magazine Examiner. His second book Endymion appeared in 1818. Then he gave up medicine for poetry. In the summer of 1818 Keats left London and started on a walking tour through England and Scotland. During his travels he became acquainted with the life of small towns and villages and witnessed the poverty and privations of the people. In Scotland he visited the home and the grave of Burns. He left some letters and poems written during the tour, which show his interest in the political life of his country and his concern for the miserable condition of the common people. Points of view (1) Keats was a moderate radical in comparison with Byron and Shelley. Naturally he was against political oppression (more consciously so when he was under the influence of Leigh Hunt). He was horrified by the savage poverty and the human degradation he saw among the Scottish and Irish peasants. As a poet he was too possessed by the tragic view of man; as a man his life was riven with too many tragedies. (2) Keats believed that poetry is a release from misery, a vehicle to paradise. The lofty mission of his poetry is to work for the welfare of the people. The dominant thoughts and feelings in his poetry can be summarized like this: the world of nature is beautiful; the realms of art, poetry and imagination fire wonderful; but the existing human society contains inescapable and irremediable misery. At the heart of his major