Quotes & anectdotes from
the wise,
the foolish,
the courageous &
the drunk

John Keats Poet

  • Gender: Male
  • Citizenship: England
  • Born: Oct 31, 1795
  • Died: Feb 23, 1821

John Keats was an English Romantic poet. He was one of the main figures of the second generation of Romantic poets along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley despite his work having been in publication for only four years before his death.

Although his poems were not generally well received by critics during his life, his reputation grew after his death, so that by the end of the 19th century, he had become one of the most beloved of all English poets. He had a significant influence on a diverse range of poets and writers. Jorge Luis Borges stated that his first encounter with Keats was the most significant literary experience of his life.

The poetry of Keats is characterised by sensual imagery most notably in the series of odes. Today his poems and letters are some of the most popular and most analysed in English literature.

Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

Scenery is fine - but human nature is finer.

With a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections, and the truth of imagination.

The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate.

Love is my religion - I could die for it.

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' - that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.

Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced.

A thing of beauty is a joy forever: its loveliness increases it will never pass into nothingness.

I love you the more in that I believe you had liked me for my own sake and for nothing else.

Land and sea, weakness and decline are great separators, but death is the great divorcer for ever.

What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth.

Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?

There is nothing stable in the world uproar's your only music.

My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.

Now a soft kiss - Aye, by that kiss, I vow an endless bliss.

The poetry of the earth is never dead.

There is not a fiercer hell than the failure in a great object.