John Keats

John Keats was a very important representative of the English Romanticism. In contrast with the neo-classic poetry, the romantic poets laid emphasis on a highly imaginative and emotionally coloured perception of life. They minutely recorded their own experiences and responses and explored the inner world of passions, hopes and yearnings. Together with George G. Byron and Percy. B . Shelley, John Keats belonged to that wing of romanticism called active. John Keats has come to be ranked with England's finest poets. He was a supreme painter of sensuous beauty in nature, as well as one of the profoundest poetic minds his country has ever had. Like Byron and Shelley, he was animated by lofty humanistic ideals. His life was short, but in only five years before he died at the age of 27, he had attained such mastery of poetic forms as only a Shakespeare or a Milton had possessed in the past. His literary activity comprises: narrative poems ("Endymion", "Hyperion", "The Fall of Hyperion"), celebrated odes, ("Ode on a Grecian Urn", "Ode on Melancholy", "Ode to a Nightingale") and beautiful ballads ("The Eve of Saint Agnes", "La Belle Dame sans Merci"), as well as famous sonnets ("Sleep and Poetry", "The Grasshoper and the Cricket").