JOHN KEATS | John keats Poem | Keats life and work

JOHN KEATS :Faerie Queen:

JOHN KEATS (1795-1821) At the age of seventeen, John Keats became acquainted with the works of Spenser when he read "Faerie Queen" which was given to him by his friend Cowden Clarke and this proved to be the turning point in his life. The mannerisms of the Elizabethan poet immediately captivated him, and he resolved to imitate him. His earliest attempt at verse is his Imitation of Spenser (1813), written when he was eighteen. This and some other short pieces were published together in his Poems (1817), his first volume of verse. This book contains little of any outstanding merit, except for some of its sonnets, which include the superb On First Looking into Chapman's Homer. While on one hand we can say that Spenser had been Keats' first enchanter, the second being Homer; on the other he owed much to Leigh Hunt for wise and generous encouragement and direction. The poems, which include Sleep and Poetry and I stood tip toe upon a little hill, show the influence of Spenser and more immediately, of Leigh Hunt, to whom the volume was dedicated. Of a different quality was his next volume, called Endymion (1818). Probably based partly on Drayton's The Man in the Moon and Fletcher's The Faithful Shepherdess, this remarkable poem of Endynion professes to tell the story of the lovely youth who was kissed by the moon goddess on the summit of mount Latmos. Keats develops this simple myth into an intricate and flowery and rather obscure allegory of over four thousand lines. 

The work is clearly immature, and flawed with many weaknesses both of taste and of construction, but many of the passages are the most beautiful, and the poem shows the tender budding of the Keatsian style- a rich and suggestive beauty obtained by a richly ornamented diction. However the crudeness of the work laid it open to attack and the hostile reviews found it an easy prey.