John Keats was an English poet. Although not generally well received by his contemporary critics, he has become one of England’s best-loved poets. His poetry, and also his ideas about “negative capability” and the “vale of soul-making”, have bettered not only my work but my life.I woke up recently with a line from a song in my head. The song was “Cemetery Gates” by The Smiths–one of their signature jaunty-melody-with-morose-lyrics numbers. The actual meaning of the song is less important than the way my own subconscious seems to have appropriated the message upon waking. I rolled over in bed and …
In case, like me, you may have been taking yourself a bit too seriously lately, please enjoy what may be one of the strangest Monty Python sketches in history, featuring three of the big six of Romantic poetry, ants, the queen, and lots of sherry–all conveniently subtitled in Spanish: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/2sDYmnk07i8]Click here to watch the video.
We sheltered in John Keats’s house this afternoon. (“Hampstead isn’t far; we won’t need our rain wear!”) Poignant, to see the couch on which he retired, the view he contemplated, toward the end of his short life. More fodder for my thinking on poetic tradition: apparently he wrote poems in the pages of his Complete …
