Keats

Having just done a quick appraisee of Keats, a poet I had not read although I knew the titles  of some of his poetry. One is struck by the contrived way the intellectual poet has to construct his craft and produce work known as much for its metre as for its resonance. The technical term for the beat or the measure is a "spondee". The term "negative capability" in which the poet describes the things around him with an almost mystical composure lent him the title of being a "Romantic Poet" and it's this mixture of rhythmic metre and romantic compilation ( not romantic as between a man and a woman but endowing everything with an infinite meaning ) which marks him as a Romantic.

The heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,

Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains

One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk

It's not through envy of they happy lot

But being too happy in thine happiness

That thou light winged Dryad of the trees

In some melodious plot

Of Beechen green, and shadows numberless

Singest of summer in full throated ease

His short life was rich in the friends and supporters, the names mark a Parthenon of English poets and writers such as Byron and Shelly

His early career of training to become a doctor, especially when one considers the rudimentary nature of surgery seems a harsh world to walk in with the contrasting sympathy of observing and writing about the beauty of the world at the bottom of his garden.

His life would have been so different if he had known of the substantial money's bequeathed to him from within the family but he was never told and so money was always at the back of his mind.

Tuberculosis, which eventually killed him was a common enemy amongst his friends and family and the nursing of his brother Tom must have been the site of his own infection.

Poetry did not flow, it was a work in hand as he struggled to shape the poem, its words and the meaning of those words used in the difficult format of a poem. 

There are many heraldic poets like of Tennyson who's 'Charge of the Light Brigade' lead one onto the upland heroic or 'The Brook' a favourite of my Father with its synonymous link with life's journey and the unending nature of the stream which never dies.

I come from haunts of coot and hern

I make a sudden sally

And sparkle out amongst the fern

To bicker down a valley

By thirty hills I hurry down

Or slip between the ridges

By twenty thorps, a little town

And half a hundred bridges

Till last by Philips farm I flow

To join the brimming river

For men may come and men may go

But I go on for ever.

 Grays, 'Elegy written in an English grave yard' is another call to the past and the present. The opening lines catch the reader straight away, there is no technical contrivance to mystify, only the simple metre of men going about their business. 

"The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, 
The lowering herd winds slowly o'er the lea

The ploughman plods his weary way

And leaves the world to darkness and to me."

Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight

And all the air a Solemn stillness holds

Save where the beetle wheals his drowning flight

And drowsy inklings lull the distant folds

Save from yonder Ivy-mantled tower

The moping owl to the moon does complain

Of such as wandering near her secret bower

Molest her ancient and solitary reign

              ---     ----    ----   ----

Some village hampden that with dauntless breast

The little tyrant of his field withstood 

Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest

Some Cromwell guiltless of his countries blood.

    I'm not sure how you instil the love of poetry by teaching the young person the techniques of observation using subject matter remote and far from the young mind, living in an age such as ours. His poetry is the stuff of university not the 6th form but then perhaps, as in so many things, I am wrong and underestimate youths sensitivity to form and texture ?

"Hey teachers! Leave them kids alone! All in all its just another brick in the wall"