John Keats

John Keats was an extraordinary poet, achieving more than most even though he died at 26. He, in his techniques and style, has oft been compared to Shakespeare. John Keats had many opinions about the role of poetry and the role of the poet, and often wrote specifically on the two to his friends and colleagues, providing us with invaluable lessons in life and art.
Keats has many theories on what poetry is and what it should do. He believeds that the excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate. “Disagreeables”, as he calls them, were a main influence in Keats’s writing and life. He saw experience as “a tangle of inseparable but irreconcilable opposites.” He finds sadness in happiness and pleasure in pain. The highest intensity of love he compares to death. He thinks that Beauty is Truth, and this is how he explains why we take pleasure in the aesthetic representation of the ugly or painful. To him, Poetry should be agreeable...