John Keats biography and group work

John Keats (1795–1821)

The Poetry Foundation has this to say about Keats: “John Keats, who died at the age of twenty-five, had perhaps the most remarkable career of any English poet. He published only fifty-four poems, in three slim volumes and a few magazines. But at each point in his development he took on the challenges of a wide range of poetic forms from the sonnet, to the Spenserian romance, to the Miltonic epic, defining anew their possibilities with his own distinctive fusion of earnest energy, control of conflicting perspectives and forces, poetic self-consciousness, and, occasionally, dry ironic wit. In the case of the English ode he brought its form, in the five great odes of 1819, to its most perfect definition.”

A few notable facts about Keats' life and career: 

• Keats came from an economically comfortable family of self-employed working people. His father ran and later owned a stable and inn.

• He didn’t have the kind of classical and literary education many poets of his day had. He trained to be a surgeon (a profession that at the time had a status more akin to a pharmacist than the higher status doctors tend to have now). 

• During his lifetime, his work did not achieve much critical acclaim.

• He wasn’t associated socially with other late Romantic poets, but studied earlier Romantics like Wordsworth on his own. He came to be associated with the Romantics only as his fame grew after his death. 

• Within a generation after his death, Keats’s literary star rose to a great height and he became one of the most acclaimed and beloved of English poets, often classed with Shakespeare, despite his brief life and his subsequent relatively slim body of work. Today, he’s considered by many scholars and poetry lovers to be one of the greatest lyric poets in English.

After you read the ode aloud as a class, get in groups of three or four and discuss, illustrate, and answer these questions for “Ode on a Grecian Urn”:

• What scenes does this piece of pottery seem to depict, according to the speaker’s descriptions? Draw the urn from at least two different angles, reproducing the scenes to the best of your artistic ability. (Ideally, draw on the art skills of more than one person in your group.) Pay attention to specific details in the poem when you’re creating the figures/scenes, and add some brief quotes from the poem to suggest what details inspired your illustration.
• Why does the speaker envy the figures on the urn? In particular, why does he envy the “fair youth” he addresses in the second section? In general, why does he envy all the figures depicted there? Answer this question at the bottom or on the back of the page, and add quotations to your drawing, to show how the speaker expresses his envy toward particular figures on the urn, and toward the urn’s “inhabitants” in general.
• Read the aphorism Keats coins in the final two lines. Does this seem true to you? How so and how not? Discuss this and write a brief response to the ideas expressed in the last two lines––either the consensus you come to as a group, or the different perspectives represented in your discussion–– at the bottom of the page, or on the back of your drawing, if there's not enough room on the front.
• Be sure to include the names of everyone in your group on your illustrated answer sheet.