IMAGINE WRITING ONE great ode: a lofty, lyrical poem that could soar to the heights of rhapsody in one stanza and plunge to the depths of mortal suffering in the next. Well, John Keats wrote six of them. In less than a year. When he was only twenty-four years old. Between 1818 and 1819, a furiously imaginative period known as his annus mirabilis (year of wonders), Keats lost his brother to tuberculosis and fell head-over-heels in love. He also produced dozens of poems, including two versions of the epic Hyperion and his six major odes. Five of these he wrote in a three-and-a-half-week burst between April and May 1819: “Ode to Psyche,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on Melancholy,” and “Ode on Indolence.” He completed the sequence that September with a mournful celebration of fleeting splendor, “To Autumn.” In “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Keats wrote the famous line, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” See if you can separate the beautiful from the false in this quiz about Keats.
TRUE OR FALSE?
1. John Keats was born into one of London’s wealthiest families.
2. Keats was barely five feet tall.
3. Childhood friends remembered Keats as a well-behaved, studious boy.
4. Ever a romantic, Keats’s dying wish was that his name not appear on his grave.
5. Though his poetic output was prolific, Keats lived only to age twenty-five.
ANSWERS
1. False. Keats’s family ran a London stable called the Swan and Hoop.
2. True. He once wrote, “My mind has been the most discontented and restless one that ever was put into a body too small for it.”
3. False. Keats fought often as a boy; one schoolmate recalled his “terrier courage.”
4. True. His tombstone reads, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”
5. True. Keats, born 1795, died from tuberculosis in 1821.