John Keats Quotes on Literature (11 Quotes)


    Souls of poets dead and gone, What Elysium have ye known, Happy field or mossy cavern, Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern Have ye tippled drink more fine Than mine host's Canary wine

    How does the poet speak to men with power, but by being still more a man than they.

    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.

    Should ever the fine-eyed maid to me be kind Ah surely it must be whenever I find Some flowery spot, sequestered, wild, romantic That often must have seen a poet frantic.

    I have met with women whom I really think would like to be married to a poem, and to be given away by a novel.


    Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.

    Literature is the Thought of thinking Souls.

    What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the chameleon poet.

    My passions are all asleep from my having slumbered till nearly eleven and weakened the animal fiber all over me to a delightful sensation about three degrees on this sight of faintness -- if I had teeth of pearl and the breath of lilies I should call it languor -- but as I am I must call it laziness. In this state of effeminacy the fibers of the brain are relaxed in common with the rest of the body, and to such a happy degree that pleasure has no show of enticement and pain no unbearable frown. Neither poetry, nor ambition, nor love have any alertness of countenance as they pass by me.

    A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity - he is continually informing and filling some other body.

    I am fit for nothing but literature.


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