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the experience of reading in Britain, from 1450 to 1945...

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Listings for Author:  

John Keats

 

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John Keats : Lamia

I finished Keats?s Lamia, Isabella, Eve of St Agnes & Hyperion, before breakfast. The three first disappointed me. The extracts I had seen of them, were undeniably the finest things in them. But there is some surprising poetry ? poetry of wonderful grandeur, in the Hyperion. The effect of the appearance of Hyperion, among the ruined Titans, is surpassingly fine. Poor poor Keats. His name shall be in my ?Poets Record.?

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett      Print: Book

  

John Keats : Isabella

I finished Keats?s Lamia, Isabella, Eve of St Agnes & Hyperion, before breakfast. The three first disappointed me. The extracts I had seen of them, were undeniably the finest things in them. But there is some surprising poetry ? poetry of wonderful grandeur, in the Hyperion. The effect of the appearance of Hyperion, among the ruined Titans, is surpassingly fine. Poor poor Keats. His name shall be in my ?Poets Record.?

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett      Print: Book

  

John Keats : Eve of St Agnes

I finished Keats?s Lamia, Isabella, Eve of St Agnes & Hyperion, before breakfast. The three first disappointed me. The extracts I had seen of them, were undeniably the finest things in them. But there is some surprising poetry ? poetry of wonderful grandeur, in the Hyperion. The effect of the appearance of Hyperion, among the ruined Titans, is surpassingly fine. Poor poor Keats. His name shall be in my ?Poets Record.?

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett      Print: Book

  

John Keats : Hyperion

I finished Keats?s Lamia, Isabella, Eve of St Agnes & Hyperion, before breakfast. The three first disappointed me. The extracts I had seen of them, were undeniably the finest things in them. But there is some surprising poetry ? poetry of wonderful grandeur, in the Hyperion. The effect of the appearance of Hyperion, among the ruined Titans, is surpassingly fine. Poor poor Keats. His name shall be in my ?Poets Record.?

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett      Print: Book

  

John Keats : Endymion

I finished the Endymion today. I do not admire it as a fine poem; but I do admire many passages of it, as being very fine poetry. As a whole, it is cumbrous & unwieldy. You don?t know where to put it. Your imagination is confused by it: & your feelings uninterested. And yet a poet wrote it. When I had done with Keats, I took up Theophrastus. Theophrastus has a great deal of vivacity, & power of portraiture about him; & uplifts that veil of distance ? veiling the old Greeks with such sublime mistiness; & shows you how they used to spit & take physic & wear nailed shoes tout comme un autre?Theophrastus does me no good just now: & as I can?t laugh with him, I shall be glad when I have done hearing him laugh.

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett      Print: Book

  

John Keats : 

'Garratt escaped [from factory life] to an evening course in English literature, where he felt "like a child that becomes ecstatic with a fireworks display". Keats, Shelley, and Tennyson "swamped the trivialities of life and gave my ego a fulness and strength in the lustre of which noble conceptions were born and flourished'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: V.W. Garratt      Print: Book

  

John Keats : 'Ode to a Nightingale'

'[Muir's] account of his reading material as a young man in Glasgow points to an involvement with poems of the Romantic and post-Romantic periods which were concerned both with visionary experience and with the need to transcend human suffering. He tells us: I was enchanted by The Solitary Reaper, the Ode to a Nightingale, the Ode to the West Wind, The Lotus Eaters, and the chorus from Atalanta in Calydon'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Edwin Muir      Print: Unknown

  

John Keats : 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'

[Alice Foley] read some Morris and less Marx, but for her a liberal education for the proletariat was not merely a means of achieving socialism: it was socialism in fact. At night school she staged a personal revolution by writing a paper on Romeo and Juliet and thriling to the "new romantic world" of Jane Eyre. She joined a Socialist Sunday School where 'Hiawatha' was recited for its "prophetic idealism", and a foundry hammerman intoned Keats's 'Eve of St Agnes and 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Alice Foley      Print: Book

  

John Keats : 'The Eve of St Agnes'

[Alice Foley] read some Morris and less Marx, but for her a liberal education for the proletariat was not merely a means of achieving socialism: it was socialism in fact. At night school she staged a personal revolution by writing a paper on Romeo and Juliet and thriling to the "new romantic world" of Jane Eyre. She joined a Socialist Sunday School where 'Hiawatha' was recited for its "prophetic idealism", and a foundry hammerman intoned Keats's 'Eve of St Agnes and 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Alice Foley      Print: Book

  

John Keats : 

'In 1898 Armstrong organised the Ashington Debating and Literary Improvement Society, and his reading broadened out to Shakespeare, Burns, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Byron, Whitman, Wordsworth, Scott, Robert Browning, Darwin and T.H. Huxley. Robertson Nicoll's British Weekly had introduced him to a more liberal Nonconformity that was hospitable to contemporary literature. The difficulty was that the traditional Nonconformist commitment to freedom of conscience was propelling him beyond the confines of Primitive Methodism, as far as Unitarianism, the Rationalist Press Association and the Independent Labour Party. His tastes in literature evolved apace: Ibsen, Zola. Meredith, and Wilde by the 1890s; then on to Shaw, Wells, and Bennett; and ultimately Marxist economics and Brave New World'.

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Chester Armstrong      Print: Book

  

John Keats : 

'Robert White... had somewhat more progressive tastes [than Robert Story], which extended to Shelley, Keats, Childe Harold, and The Lady of the Lake. But his reading stopped short at the Romantics. In 1873 he confessed that he could not stomach avant-garde poets like Tennyson. "As for our modern novel-writers - Dickens, Thackeray and others I do not care to read them, since Smollett, Fielding and Scott especially are all I desire".'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Robert White      Print: Book

  

John Keats : 

[due to the fact that books in working class communities were generally cheap out of copyright reprints, not new works] Welsh collier Joseph Keating was able to immerse himself in Swift, Pope, Fielding, Richardson, Smollett, Sheridan, Goldsmith, Keats, Byron, Shelley, Dickens and Greek philosophy, as well as the John Dicks edition of Vanity Fair in weekly installments. The common denominator among these authors was that they were all dead. "Volumes by living authors were too high-priced for me", Keating explained. "Our schoolbooks never mentioned living writers; and the impression in my mind was that an author, to be a living author, must be dead and that his work was all the better if he died of neglect and starvation".'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Keating      Print: Book

  

John Keats : [a minor poem]

'orphanage boy Thomas Burke... devoured books until "my mind became a lumber room". Inevitably, "criticism was beyond me; the hungry man has no time for the fastidiousness of the epicure. I was hypnotised by the word Poet. A poem by Keats (some trifle never meant for print) was a poem by Keats. Pope, Cowper and Kirke White and Mrs Hemans and Samuel Rogers were Poets. That was enough."'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Burke      Print: Unknown

  

John Keats : [unknown, poetry]

'The son of a barely literate Derbyshire collier recalled a sister, a worker in a hosiery factory, who was steeped in the poetry of Byron, Shelley, Keats and D.H. Lawrence. Their mother's reading "would astonish the modern candidate for honours in English at any university", he claimed. "Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgeniev, Dumas, Hugo, Thackeray, Meredith, Scott, Dickens, all the classics, poetry etc., all these gave her immense joy".'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group:      Print: Book

  

John Keats : unknown

' ... [Elizabeth and Alice Thompson] used to go for picnics at Porto Fino, loaded with books of verse, and Mrs Thompson and Mr [Alfred] Strettell would read aloud to them from Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, and Tennyson.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Christiana Thompson      Print: Book

  

John Keats : unknown

' ... [Elizabeth and Alice Thompson] used to go for picnics at Porto Fino, loaded with books of verse, and Mrs Thompson and Mr [Alfred] Strettell would read aloud to them from Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, and Tennyson.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Baker Strettell      Print: Book

  

John Keats : unknown

Alice Meynell recalls childhood reading: 'In quite early childhood I lived upon Wordsworth ... When I was about twelve I fell in love with Tennyson, and cared for nothing else until, at fifteen, I discovered Keats and then Shelley.'

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alice Thompson      

  

John Keats : [unknown]

[analysis of a female respondent in Arnold Freeman's 1918 Sheffield Survey] 'Machinist in a shell factory, age twenty-four... Has read Shakespeare, Burns, Keats, Scott, Tennyson, Dickens, Vanity Fair, The Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, biography and history'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: questionaire respondent      Print: Book

  

John Keats : [unknown]

'In 1955 Manny Shinwell - who read all of Palgrave's Golden Treasury to his children, and had consoled himself in prison with Keats and Tennyson - regretted that that poetic heritage had been surrendered to the cinema and radio: "In the early days of the [socialist] movement it was common practice of speakers to recite poetry...".'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Emmanuel (Manny) Shinwell      Print: Book

  

John Keats : 

" But I read with unchecked voracity, and in several curious directions...I made aquaintance with Keats, who entirely captivated me."

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Edmund Gosse      Print: Book

  

John Keats : 

'While his widowed mother... worked a market stall, Ralph Finn scrambled up the scholarship ladder to Oxford University. He credited his success largely to his English master at Davenant Foundation School: "When I was an East End boy searching for beauty, hardly knowing what I was searching for, fighting against all sorts of bad beginnings and unrewarding examples, he more than anyone taught me to love our tremndous heritage of English language and literature". And Finnn never doubted that it was HIS heritage: "My friends and companions Tennyson, Browning, Keats, Shakespeare, Francis Thompson, Donne, Housman, the Rosettis. All as alive to me as thought they had been members of my family". After all, as he was surprised and pleased to discover, F.T. Palgrave (whose Golden Treasury he knew thoroughly) was part-Jewish'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Ralph Finn      Print: Book

  

John Keats : 

'As a collier [Joseph Keating]... heard a co-worker sigh, "Heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate". Keating was stunned: "You are quoting Pope". "Ayh", replied his companion, "me and Pope do agree very well". Keating had himself been reading Pope, Fielding, Smollett, Goldsmith and Richardson in poorly printed paperbacks. Later he was reassigned to a less demanding job at a riverside colliery pumping station, which allowed him time to tackle Swift, Sheridan, Byron, Keats, Shelley and Thackeray'.

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Keating      Print: Book

  

John Keats : [unknown]

'No national commentator sympathised with working-class culture so well as Wilfred Pickles, BBC newsreader and stonemason's son. But even he admitted that the hours he spent in the public library, reading Shelley, Keats, Shaw and Galsworthy, represented a desperate breakout from the stultifying provincialism of his native Halifax.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Wilfred Pickles      Print: Book

  

John Keats : Hyperion

Letter 202 to Ralph Hodges, Woodstock, N.Y., Aug 15 1939: 'I?ve done lots of work ? finished this small piece for Toronto I mentioned to you ? "Young Apollo" (after Keats), Fanfare for Piano, Solo String quartet, & string orchestra.' Letter 227 to Wulff Scherchen,Amityville N.Y., December 8th 1939 'I?m playing my "Young Apollo? which I wrote for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. ? on Columbia on Dec. 20th, sometime in the middle of your night ? you know whom that?s written about ? founded on last lines of Keat?s "Hyperion?'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Benjamin Britten      Print: Book

  

John Keats : [unknown]

'Masefield habitually purchased a book each Friday evening and read it over the weekend. Among the first purchases was a seventy-five cent copy of Chaucer; and that evening, as he recalled, "I stretched myself on my bed, and began to read 'The Parliament of Fowls'; and with the first lines entered into a world of poetry until then unknown to me". As a result, Masefield's study of poetry deepened, and Chaucer, John Milton, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats became his mentors. Shelley converted the impressionable youth to vegetarianism....Unfortunately [he] overdid vegetarianism by abjuring milk; and, weak from lack of protein, he finally gave up the regimen'.

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: John Masefield      Print: Book

  

John Keats : [unknown]

'He was also interesting himself in poets such as Keats, Fitzgerald and Yeats'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Lawrence Durrell      Print: Book

  

John Keats : The Eve of Saint Agnes

'Then, when I was twelve we had a really good poetry book which contained extracts from "The Excursion", part of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage", "The Eve of Saint Agnes", "Adonais", "The Pied Piper of Hamelin", and Mathew Arnold's "Tristram and Iseult". We were given "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" and "The Pied Piper" to learn by heart in consecutive years. I never liked "The Pied Piper", which, being written consciously as a child's poem, made me feel conscious, and most of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" seemed unreal to me... The poems in the book which I liked best were "The Eve of Saint Agnes" and "Tristram and Iseult"...'

Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Edwin Muir      Print: Book

  

John Keats : [unknown]

'Maybe to neutralise the Penny Dreadful, Cassells brought out the Penny Classics. These had a bluish-green cover and were world famous novels in abridged form, but sixty or seventy pages. And W.T. Stead brought out the Penny Poets. The covers of these were pimply surface-paper, a bright orange colour, and they contained selections from Longfellow, Tennyson, Keats, and many others. I first read "Hiawatha" and "Evangeline" in the Penny Poets and thought them marvellous; so marvellous that I began to write 'poetry' myself. Stead also brought out another penny book; this had a pink cover and contained selections from the ancient classics: stories from Homer, the writings of Pliny the younger, Aesop's "Fables". I took a strong fancy to Aesop, he was a Greek slave from Samos, in the sixth century BC, and workpeople were only just beginning to be called "wage slaves". I read all these; non-selective and Catholic my reading...'

Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Stamper      Print: Book

  

John Keats : [unknown]

'So that, whatever may have been its deeper cause, the love which filled my imagination was of a kind that seemed, to me, to have little to do with what I meant by sex. "Love" was something I had learned about from "David Copperfield" and "Under the Greenwood Tree" and from the stories in "The Woman's Weekly", which my mother occasionally bought. And of course, from the poetry I was beginning to enjoy. I was naively oblivious to the sexual innuendoes of Keats and Tennyson but their romantic raptures set me trembling like a tuning fork. "Come into the garden, Maud" roused nothing of the derision, or even downright ribaldry, that it would surely rouse in a boy of today.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Norman Nicholson      Print: Book

  

John Keats : [unknown works]

'Our syllabus was large, covering at least twelve set books: two plays of Shakespeare's, two volumes of Milton and two of Keats; Chaucer, Sheridan, Lamb, Scott's "Old Mortality" and the first book of "The Golden Treasury", with its marvellous pickings of Coleridge, Shelly, Byron and, especially, Wordsworth, which excited me, at that age, more than any other poetry written.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Norman Nicholson      Print: Book

  

John Keats : Letters

'January 14. "To be happy with you seems such an impossibility! It requres a luckier star than mine! It will never be...The world is too brutal for me." [Keats to Fanny Brawne, August 1820]'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Katherine Mansfield      Print: Book

  

John Keats : Endymion

'[Tuesday] Sept. 26th. [...] Read Keats' Endymion. [...] 'Wednesday Sept. 27th. Do some Latin from Virgil [...] Finish Keats' Endymion.'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Claire Clairmont      Print: Book

  

John Keats : Isabella, or the Pot of Basil

'Sunday October 15th. [...] Read the Isabella or Pot of Basil by Keats [quotes four lines from stanza 10].'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Claire Clairmont      Print: Book

  

John Keats : Lamia

'Wednesday Nov. 8th. [...] Read Lamia by Keats.'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Claire Clairmont      Print: Book

  

John Keats : Hyperion

'Friday Nov. 10th. [...] Read Hyperion of Keats.'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Claire Clairmont      Print: Book

  

John Keats : Hyperion

'[Tuesday] Feb. 27th. [...] Read Hyperion of Keats.'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Claire Clairmont      Print: Book

  

John Keats : Hyperion

'S. reads Hyperion aloud'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Bysshe Shelley      Print: Book

  

John Keats : Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes and other poems

'Ride to Pisa - Keats' poems'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Shelley      Print: Book

  

John Keats : 'Ode to a Nightingale'

'You must be tired of my ugly handwriting - yet your book is so suggestive that one wants to talk about it - the more I read the more I am enchanted by it. - I have been struck however by your mention of Dante - which seems founded entirely on the Inferno - a poem I can only read bits of - the subject being to me so antipatetica but the Purgatorio & Paradiso - the Poet revels in beauty & joy there to the full as much as the horrors below - and some of his verses & even whole Cantos lap one in a gentle sort of Elysium - or carry one into the skies - Can anything be so wondrously poetical as the approach of the boat with souls from earth to Purgatory - Shelley's most favourite passage - the Angels guarding Purgatory from infernal spirits - the whole tone of hope - & the calm enjoyment of Matilda is something quite unearthly in its sweetness - & then the glory of Paradise - I do not rely on my own taste but the following verses appear to me to belong to the highest class of imagination; they occur in the last Canto of the Pardiso after the vision he has of beatitude -il mio veder fu maggio Che'l parlar nostro, ch'a tal vista cede. E cede la memoria al tanto oltraggio Quale e colui ch soguando vede, E dopo 'l sogno la passione impressa Rimane, e l'altro alla menta non riede Cotal son io, che quassi tutta cessa Mia visione, e ancor mi distila Nel cuor lo dolce, che nacque da essa. Cosi la neve al sole disigilla Cosi al vento nele foglie lievi Si perdea la sentenzia di Sibilla - Will you think me hypercritical about a most beautiful stanza of Keats - It was the sky lark not the nightingale that Ruth heard "amid the alien corn" - the sky lark soars and sings above the shearers perpetually - The nightingale sings at night - in shady places - & never so late in the season - May is her month - Excuse all this' [letter to Leigh Hunt]

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Shelley      Print: Book

  

John Keats : poems

Virginia Stephen to Violet Dickinson, 25 December 1906: 'I am reading now a book by Renan called his Memories of Childhood [Cahiers de Jeunesse, 1906]: O my word it is beautiful -- like the chime of silver bells [...] Also I am reading my dear Christina Rossetti [...] the first of our English poetesses [...] Then I am reading your Keats, with the pleasure of one handling great luminous stones. I rise and shout in ecstacy, and my eyes brim with such pleasure that I must drop the book and gaze from the window. It is a beautiful edition.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Stephen      Print: Book

  

John Keats : poems

Virginia Stephen to Violet Dickinson, ?30 December 1906: 'I have been reading Keats most of the day. I think he is about the greatest of all [...] I like cool Greek Gods, and amber skies, and shadow like running water, and all his great palpable words -- symbols for immaterial things.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Stephen      Print: Book

  

John Keats : [unknown]

[Helen Roothman] 'brought Edith new poetry too - the French symbolists, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Baudelaire - to enlarge her own rapt readings of Swinburne, William Morris, Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley, Yeats'.

Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Edith Sitwell      Print: Book

  

John Keats : [Letters]

'[included in diary entry] [italics] Keats [end italics] (Letter to Geo and Thos Keats Dec 28 1817) "negative capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason". this quality goes to make "a man of achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously". I do not think I have any 'creative' genius. What I have, if I have anything, is the capacity to [italics] recgnise [end italics] things.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White      Print: Book

  

John Keats : [Letters]

'I rarely take a book about with me now and Keats' letters have lasted me nearly two months'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White      Print: Book

  

John Keats : [Poems]

'[Basil Nicholson] loves Marvell's poems and Durer's drawings. He has a great admiration for Keats but won't read the letters "because he feels they will probably annoy him".'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Basil Nicholson      Print: Book

  

John Keats : Letters

'I read the Keats letters coming up in a belated and dawdling train. His letter to [Charles Armitage] Brown from Naples is one of the most terrifying things that I have ever read.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Harold Nicolson      Print: Book

  

John Keats : 'Ode to a Nightingale'

'Although Larkin had first read them [Auden and Isherwood] at KHS [his school], it wasn't until he reached Oxford that he began fully to appreciate their irony and ebullient detachment (he described Isherwood's first novel, "All the Conspirators", as being like "life photographed"). Eventually Larkin would praise Auden as "the first 'modern' poet, in that he could employ modern properties unselfconsciously". Reading him in St John's during his first term he felt: "Auden rose like a sun. It is impossibly to convey the intensity of the delight felt by a ... mind reared on 'Drake's Drum', 'Westminster Bridge' and 'Ode to a Nightingale, when a poet is found speaking a language thrilling and beautiful, and describing things so near to everyday life that their once-removedness strikes like a strange cymbal. We entered the land, books in hand, like travellers with a guidebook... 'Poems', 'The Orators' and 'Look, Stranger!' seemed three fragments of revealed truth... To read 'The Journal of an Airman' was like being allowed half an hour's phone conversation with God".'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Philip Larkin      Print: Book

  

John Keats : 

'The "faithful Fitz" [Edward Fitzgerald] writes that as early as 1835, when he met my father in the Lake Country, at the Speddings' (Mirehouse, by Bassenthwaite Lake) he saw what was to be part of this 1842 volume [of Tennyson's poetry], the "Morte d'Arthur," "The Day-Dream," "The Lord of Burleigh," "Dora," and "The Gardener's Daughter." They were read out of an MS. "in a little red book to him and Spedding of a night, when all the house was mute [...] My father read them a great deal of Wordsworth, "the dear old fellow," as he called him [...] Fitzgerald notes again: '"I could remember A. T. saying he remembered the time when he could see nothing in 'Michael' which he now read us in admiration [...]" 'My father also read Keats and Milton'.

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      Print: Book

  

John Keats : Endymion

'He marked personal details in Colvin's biography of Keats, particularly when they seemed to coincide with his own, noticing that Keats's mind was "naturally unapt for dogma", that Keats and Hunt were given to "luxuriating" over "deliciousness", and that Reynolds came from Shrewsbury and "lacked health and energy". He involved himself similarly in the poems. "Endymion" and 'Lamia' kept his pencil especially busy as he underlined rich vocabulary and marked lush descriptions, including that of the sleeping Adonis. A bookmarker in "Endymion", embroidered with the text "create in me a clean heart O God", seems to have prayed in vain among sensuous passages in which he evidently delighted, but perhaps guilt overcame him after reading 'Lamia', because four pages of erotic description have been carefully stuck together'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Wilfred Owen      Print: Book

  

John Keats : 'Lamia'

'He marked personal details in Colvin's biography of Keats, particularly when they seemed to coincide with his own, noticing that Keats's mind was "naturally unapt for dogma", that Keats and Hunt were given to "luxuriating" over "deliciousness", and that Reynolds came from Shrewsbury and "lacked health and energy". He involved himself similarly in the poems. "Endymion" and 'Lamia' kept his pencil especially busy as he underlined rich vocabulary and marked lush descriptions, including that of the sleeping Adonis. A bookmarker in "Endymion", embroidered with the text "create in me a clean heart O God", seems to have prayed in vain among sensuous passages in which he evidently delighted, but perhaps guilt overcame him after reading 'Lamia', because four pages of erotic description have been carefully stuck together'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Wilfred Owen      Print: Book

  

John Keats : Letters

'Owen turned to his third main interest, the earth sciences, doing his earnest but unscholarly best to tackle the Victorian debate between science and religion. He was soon "reading analysing, collecting, sifting and classifying Evidence" and "grappling as I never did before with the problem of Evolution". He read a statement of the Christian answer to Darwinism but contemptuously wrote "Shallow!" against its discussion of art. His conclusion was probably summed up in a comment he had marked in Keats's letters, "Nothing in this world is proveable"; when he met these words again in W.M. Rossetti's life of Keats, he added, "at least [italics] proved [end italics] W.O.".'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Wilfred Owen      Print: Book

  

John Keats : 

'the two poets [Owen and Sassoon] probably talked more about literature than anything else. Owen found that they had been "following parallel trenches all our lives" and "had more friends in common, authors I mean, than most people can boast of in a lifetime". By chance, Sassoon was reading a small volume of Keats which Lady Ottoline [Morrel] had sent him. He shared Owen's interest in the late-Victorian poets, including Housman, whose influence is often apparent in his war poems, but Owen was surprised to discover that he admired Hardy "more than anybody living". No doubt Sassoon persuaded him to start reading Hardy's poems. In return, Owen showed him Tailhade's book'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Siegfried Sassoon      Print: Book

  

John Keats : Poems

From Hallam Tennyson's account of 'My Father's Illness [1888]': 'He read or had read to him at this time the following books or essays: Leaf's edition of the Iliad; the Iphigenia of Aulis, expressing "wonder at its modernness"; Matthew Arnold on Tolstoi; Fiske's Destiny of Man; Gibbon's History, especially praising the Fall of Constantinople; Keats [sic] poems; Wordsworth's "Recluse." Of this last he said: "I like the passages which have been published before, such as that about the dance of a flock of birds, driven by a thoughtless impulse [...]" 'He often looked at his Virgil, more than ever delighting in what he called "that splendid end of the second Georgic."'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      Print: Book

  

John Keats : 

'I wrote endless imitations, though I never thought them to be imitations but, rather wonderfully original things, like eggs laid by tigers. They were imitations of anything I happened to be reading at the time: Sir Thomas Brown, de Quincey, Henry Newbolt, the Ballads, Blake, Baroness Orczy, Marlowe, Chums, the Imagists, the Bible, Poe, Keats, Lawrence, Anon., and Shakespeare. A mixed lot as you see, and randomly remembered'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Dylan Thomas      Print: Book

  

John Keats : Poems

Books read by Oscar Wilde in Reading Gaol, July 1896-December 1896, taken from his list of books requested and then sent by his friends. Source text author notes that Wilde read and re-read everything available to him in prison. 'Greek Testament, Milman's History of the Jews; Farrar's St Paul, Tennyson's Poems (complete in one volume), Percy's Reliques (the collection of old ballads), Christopher Marlowe's Works, Carlyle's Sartor Resartus and Life of Frederick the Great, A prose translation of Dante's Divine Comedy, Keats's Poems, Chaucer's Poems, Spenser's Poems, Renan's Vie de Jesus and The Apostles, Ranke's History of the Popes, Critical and Historical Essays by Cardinal Newman, Emerson's Essays (If possible in one volume), Cheap edition of Dickens's Works.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Oscar Wilde      Print: Book

  

John Keats : Sonnet in Blue

'I am half enamoured of the paper that touched his hand, and the ink that did his bidding. [I have] grown fond of the sweet comeliness of his charactery'.

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Oscar Wilde      Manuscript: Sheet

  

John Keats : 'I stood tip-toe upon a little hill'

'Mrs Smith then read an interesting biography of Keats which was followed by a reading of "I stood tiptoe upon a little hill" by Helen Rawlings. Howard R. Smith read from Endymion & Mrs Ridges the Ode to a Nightingale. Alfred Rawlings read a paper upon the poetry of Keats & Mrs Edminson some of the sonnets & H.M. Wallis a portion of "Isabella".'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Helen Rawlings      Print: Book

  

John Keats :  Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil

'Mrs Smith then read an interesting biography of Keats which was followed by a reading of "I stood tiptoe upon a little hill" by Helen Rawlings. Howard R. Smith read from Endymion & Mrs Ridges the Ode to a Nightingale. Alfred Rawlings read a paper upon the poetry of Keats & Mrs Edminson some of the sonnets & H.M. Wallis a portion of "Isabella".'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Henry Marriage Wallis      Print: Book

  

John Keats : Endymion

'Mrs Smith then read an interesting biography of Keats which was followed by a reading of "I stood tiptoe upon a little hill" by Helen Rawlings. Howard R. Smith read from Endymion & Mrs Ridges the Ode to a Nightingale. Alfred Rawlings read a paper upon the poetry of Keats & Mrs Edminson some of the sonnets & H.M. Wallis a portion of "Isabella".'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Howard R. Smith      Print: Book

  

John Keats : 'Ode to a Nightingale'

'Mrs Smith then read an interesting biography of Keats which was followed by a reading of "I stood tiptoe upon a little hill" by Helen Rawlings. Howard R. Smith read from Endymion & Mrs Ridges the Ode to a Nightingale. Alfred Rawlings read a paper upon the poetry of Keats & Mrs Edminson some of the sonnets & H.M. Wallis a portion of "Isabella".'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Blanche Ridges      Print: Book

  

John Keats : [sonnets]

'Mrs Smith then read an interesting biography of Keats which was followed by a reading of "I stood tiptoe upon a little hill" by Helen Rawlings. Howard R. Smith read from Endymion & Mrs Ridges the Ode to a Nightingale. Alfred Rawlings read a paper upon the poetry of Keats & Mrs Edminson some of the sonnets & H.M. Wallis a portion of "Isabella".'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Edminson      Print: Book

  

John Keats : 

'Mrs Smith then read an interesting biography of Keats which was followed by a reading of "I stood tiptoe upon a little hill" by Helen Rawlings. Howard R. Smith read from Endymion & Mrs Ridges the Ode to a Nightingale. Alfred Rawlings read a paper upon the poetry of Keats & Mrs Edminson some of the sonnets & H.M. Wallis a portion of "Isabella".'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Rawlings      Print: Book

  

John Keats : Ode on a Grecian Urn

'The subject of the evening's programme was John Keats. R.H. Robson read an essay dealing with his life. The main influences & friendships of his short life were well brought out. H.M. Wallis folowed with an appreciation written in the delightful style of which our Friend is so great a master & a reading of the Grecian Urn ode by Miss Marriage completed the first part of the programme. On our return from physical refreshment Charles I. Evans described the Poems of 1820 and some readings were given by Mrs Evans, Mrs Robson & C.E. Stansfield.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Marriage      Print: Book

  

John Keats : 

'The subject of the evening's programme was John Keats. R.H. Robson read an essay dealing with his life. The main influences & friendships of his short life were well brought out. H.M. Wallis folowed with an appreciation written in the delightful style of which our Friend is so great a master & a reading of the Grecian Urn ode by Miss Marriage completed the first part of the programme. On our return from physical refreshment Charles I. Evans described the Poems of 1820 and some readings were given by Mrs Evans, Mrs Robson & C.E. Stansfield.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Katherine Evans      Print: Book

  

John Keats : 

'The subject of the evening's programme was John Keats. R.H. Robson read an essay dealing with his life. The main influences & friendships of his short life were well brought out. H.M. Wallis folowed with an appreciation written in the delightful style of which our Friend is so great a master & a reading of the Grecian Urn ode by Miss Marriage completed the first part of the programme. On our return from physical refreshment Charles I. Evans described the Poems of 1820 and some readings were given by Mrs Evans, Mrs Robson & C.E. Stansfield.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Robson      Print: Book

  

John Keats : 

'The subject of the evening's programme was John Keats. R.H. Robson read an essay dealing with his life. The main influences & friendships of his short life were well brought out. H.M. Wallis folowed with an appreciation written in the delightful style of which our Friend is so great a master & a reading of the Grecian Urn ode by Miss Marriage completed the first part of the programme. On our return from physical refreshment Charles I. Evans described the Poems of 1820 and some readings were given by Mrs Evans, Mrs Robson & C.E. Stansfield.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Stansfield      Print: Book

  

John Keats : [1820 poems]

'The subject of the evening's programme was John Keats. R.H. Robson read an essay dealing with his life. The main influences & friendships of his short life were well brought out. H.M. Wallis folowed with an appreciation written in the delightful style of which our Friend is so great a master & a reading of the Grecian Urn ode by Miss Marriage completed the first part of the programme. On our return from physical refreshment Charles I. Evans described the Poems of 1820 and some readings were given by Mrs Evans, Mrs Robson & C.E. Stansfield.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Evans      Print: Book

  

John Keats : 

'The subject of the evening's programme was John Keats. R.H. Robson read an essay dealing with his life. The main influences & friendships of his short life were well brought out. H.M. Wallis folowed with an appreciation written in the delightful style of which our Friend is so great a master & a reading of the Grecian Urn ode by Miss Marriage completed the first part of the programme. On our return from physical refreshment Charles I. Evans described the Poems of 1820 and some readings were given by Mrs Evans, Mrs Robson & C.E. Stansfield.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Henry Marriage Wallis      Print: Book

  

John Keats : Endymion

[between journal entries for 26 January and 29 September 1881] 'When Parliament adjourned for a recess in April Charles Schreiber [M.P.] was obliged to go to Liverpool to look after a nephew and niece there: Lady Charlotte accompanied him [...] In an entry in her journal during this visit she says that she has seen enough of it [Liverpool] and never wishes to revisit it [...] A few days laterr she records that she was reading Endymion with much interest, none the less for all the anxiety she felt about Lord Beaconsfield [Benjamin Disraeli]'s health, which was causing great anxiety at the time. He died on April 19.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Lady Charlotte Schreiber      Print: Book

 

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