John Keats was one of the key poets of the English Romantic movement. During his short life, his work received constant critical attacks from the periodicals of the day, but his posthumous influence on poets such as Tennyson has been notable.
Elaborate word choice and sensual imagery characterize Keats’s poetry, including a series of odes that were his masterpieces and which remain among the most popular poems in English literature.
John Keats’s letters, which expound on his aesthetic theory of “negative capability”, are among the most celebrated by any writer.
Below are some famous quotes from John Keats:
“Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”
― John Keats, Letters of John Keats
“I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days – three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.”
― John Keats, Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne
“A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”
― John Keats, Endymion: A Poetic Romance
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”
― John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn
“I have clung
To nothing, lov’d a nothing, nothing seen
Or felt but a great dream!”
― John Keats, Endymion: A Poetic Romance
“What is there in thee, Moon! That thou should’st move my heart so potently?”
― John Keats, Endymion
“Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”
― John Keats, Letters of John Keats
“O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!”
― John Keats, Letters of John Keats
“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard, are sweeter”
― John Keats, Ode On A Grecian Urn
“Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity…”
― John Keats, Ode On A Grecian Urn
“My love is selfish. I cannot breathe without you.”
― John Keats, Love Letter to Fanny Brawne
“The great beauty of Poetry is, that it makes every thing every place interesting – “
― John Keats, Letter to his brother George, 1819
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Link will appear as Hanson, Marilee. "John Keats Quotes" https://englishhistory.net/keats/john-keats-quotes/, March 2, 2022