John Keats Quotes

I feel more and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone but in a thousand worlds.

Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?

With duller steel than the Perséan sword
They cut away no formless monster's head,
But one, whose gentleness did well accord
With death, as life. The ancient harps have said,
Love never dies, but lives, immortal Lord:
If Love impersonate was ever dead,
Pale Isabella kiss'd it, and low moan'd.
'Twas love; cold, — dead indeed, but not dethroned.

You are always new. The last of your kisses was ever the sweetest; the last smile the brightest; the last movement the gracefullest.

I think poetry should surprise by a fine excess, and not by singularity; it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.

And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon.

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath.

You are always new. The last of your kisses was even the sweetest; the last smile the brightest; the last movement the gracefullest.

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity...

Blinded alike from sunshine and from rain,
As though a rose should shut, and be a bud again

"There is an old saying "well begun is half done" - 'tis a bad one. I would use instead, "Not begun at all till half done;" so according to that I have not begun my Poem and consequently (a priori) can say nothing about it."

His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead,
Unsceptred; and his realmless eyes were closed;

I still don't know how to work out a poem.

A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving into a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore, but to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out, it is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept the mystery.

Works of genius are the first things in this world.