Top 100 Quotes About Keats
#1. On a summer night it can be lovely to sit around outside with friends after dinner and, yes, read poetry to each other. Keats and Yeats will never let you down, but it's differently exciting to read the work of poets who are still walking around out there.
Michael Cunningham
#2. All my early books are written as if I were Indian. In England, I had started writing as if I were English; now I write as if I were American. You take other people's backgrounds and characters; Keats called it negative capability.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
#3. There was a day when writers actually read," he grumbles. "They could quote Keats and Socrates. Now anyone with a keyboard and a fifth-grade education can call themselves a writer.
J. Lincoln Fenn
#4. Other nights, Ayrs likes me to read him poetry, especially his beloved Keats. He whispers the verses as I recite, as if his voice is leaning on mine.
David Mitchell
#5. Do you know what would hold me together on a battlefield? The sense that I was perpetuating the language in which Keats and the rest of them wrote!
Wilfred Owen
#6. Keats, it must be remembered, was a sensualist. His poems ... reveal him as a man not altogether free from the vulgarities of sensualism, as well as one who was able to transmute it into perfect literature.
Robert Wilson Lynd
#7. Keats was getting a reputation just when he was too ill to appreciate it or build on it: his country was taking notice of him just when he would have to leave it.
Jude Morgan
#8. I want to read Keats and Wordsworth, Hemingway, George Orwell.
Aravind Adiga
#9. Whereas Hunt recommended universal charity, Keats, feeling himself 'in a Mist', relied on a knowing passivity: 'Men should bear with each other - there lives not the Man who may not be cut up, aye hashed to pieces on his weakest side'.
Nicholas Roe
#10. When Keats says: 'Axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses', what he means is that we don't necessarily believe what a poem is saying if it comes out and tells us in an absolutely head-on, in-your-face way; we only believe it to be true if we feel it to be true.
Andrew Motion
#11. Coexisting with the radiant masculinity of Apollonian Keats is a lunar poet of enchanted night in thrall to the goddess Hecate.
Nicholas Roe
#12. The verses of Byron, Keats or Poe are real whether they are in bootleg form or not. You can still read them for the same effect.
Jasper Fforde
#13. John Keats / John Keats / John / Please put your scarf on.
J.D. Salinger
#14. Keats himself spoke about how Shakespeare was capable of erasing himself completely from the characters he had created. As an actor, that is what I'm trying to do.
Ben Whishaw
#15. I can get very philosophical and ask the questions Keats was asking as a young guy. What are we here for? What's a soul? What's it all about? What is thinking about, imagination?
Jane Campion
#16. What had John Keats said about Negative Capability - holding two opposite ideas in one's mind at the same time without straining to reconcile them?
Dan Simmons
#17. Descendants of pigeons once fed by Keats, Byron, George Sand, Chopin and many other famous lovers are still being fed, and the sudden sound when they all rise together, frightened away, is like the sound of giant sails flapping.
Anais Nin
#18. What I deeply want ... is for Rumi to become vitally present for readers, part of what John Keats called our soul-making, that process that is both collective and uniquely individual, that happens outside time and space and inside, that is the ocean we all inhabit and each singular droplet-self.
Coleman Barks
#19. I don't know if I call myself a poet or not. I would like to, but I'm not really qualified to make that decision, because I come in on such a back door, that I don't know what a Robert Frost or a [John] Keats or a T.S. Eliot would really think of my stuff.
Bob Dylan
#20. In a good-natured way he had almost decided that Princeton was one part deadly Philistines and one part deadly grinds, and to find a person who could mention Keats without stammering, yet evidently washed his hands, was rather a treat.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#21. I did ... learn an important distinction in graduate school: a speculation about who had syphilis when is gossip if it's about your friends, a plot element if it's about a character in a novel, and scholarship if it's about John Keats.
Margaret Atwood
#22. Not every gay person recites poetry or has read Keats. You can get readers through anything if the characters are complicated. You can't dismiss Josey Wales' quite liberal worldview.
Marlon James
#24. It's been such a deep and amazing journey for me, getting close to John Keats, and also I love Shelley and Byron. I mean, the thing about the Romantic poets is that they've got the epitaph of romantic posthumously. They all died really young, and Keats, the youngest of them all.
Jane Campion
#25. You know who my gods are, who I believe in fervently? Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson - she's probably the top - Mozart, Shakespeare, Keats. These are wonderful gods who have gotten me through the narrow straits of life.
Maurice Sendak
#26. To John Keats Whose Name Was Writ in Eternity
Dan Simmons
#27. We learned in the university to consider Wordsworth and Keats as Romantics. They were only a generation apart, but Wordsworth didn't even read Keats's book when he gave him a copy.
Thom Gunn
#28. Keats writes better about poems than anybody I've ever read. The things that he says about what he wants his own poems to be are the ideals that I share.
Andrew Motion
#29. I felt miserable. When Keats felt miserable he always put on a clean shirt. But he was a poet.
Jeanette Winterson
#30. Writers collect stories of rituals: John Cheever putting on a jacket and tie to go down to the basement, where he kept a desk near the boiler room. Keats buttoning up his clean white shirt to write in, after work.
Mona Simpson
#31. I think for me in terms of this kind of dichotomy you have to hold the sense of negative capability in your mind - which is Keats line about being able to hold two different ideas 'without any irritable reach after fact or reason.'
Anne Waldman
#32. To like Keats is a test of fitness for understanding poetry, just as to like Shakespeare is a test of general mental capacity.
George Gissing
#33. For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#34. I lost many literary battles the day I read 'Their Eyes Were Watching God.' I had to concede that occasionally aphorisms have their power. I had to give up the idea that Keats had a monopoly on the lyrical.
Zadie Smith
#35. TEN GREATEST ENGLISH POETS Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Burns, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Browning. TEN GREATEST ENGLISH ESSAYISTS Bacon, Addison, Steele, Macaulay, Lamb, Jeffrey, De Quincey, Carlyle, Thackeray and Matthew Arnold.
Joseph Devlin
#36. As a former English major, I am a sitting duck for Gift Books, and in the past few years I've gotten Dickens, Thackeray, Smollet, Richardson, Emerson, Keats, Boswell and the Brontes, all of them Great, none of them ever read by me, all of them now on a shelf, looking at me and making me feel guilty.
Garrison Keillor
#37. Women don't want all that. Women just want a partner who is considerate and attentive, who will spoon with them while reciting Keats, and feed them organic yogurt by candlelight on a seaside cliff at sunset.
Stephen Colbert
#38. When an idea comes, spend silent time with it. Remember Keats's idea of Negative Capability and Kipling's advice to "drift, wait, and obey." Along with your gathering of hard data, allow yourself also to dream your idea into being.
Rose Tremain
#39. Only those of our poets who kept solidly to the Shakespearean tradition achieved any measure of success. But Keats was the last great exponent of that tradition, and we all know how thin, how lacking in charm, the copies of Keats have become.
Amy Lowell
#40. I believe in nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of the imagination. - JOHN KEATS
Jandy Nelson
#41. Donald Goellnicht. The Poet-Physician: Keats and Medical Science. University of Pittsburgh Press: Pittsburgh, 1984,
Stephen Cope
#42. As for how criticism of Keats' poetry relates to criticism of my own work, I'll leave that for others to decide.
Jane Campion
#43. I have many influences and poets whose work I love. My personal canon includes Blake, Keats, Dickinson, Baudelaire, Stevens, Duncan and Barbara Guest - and many living poets as well.
Brenda Hillman
#44. A poem with grandly conceived and executed stanzas, such as one of Keats's odes, should be like an enfilade of rooms in a palace: one proceeds, with eager anticipation, from room to room.
James Fenton
#46. This is why it is good to remember: if you want to get high, don't drink whiskey; read Shakespeare, Tennyson, Keats, Neruda, Hopkins, Millay, Whitman, aloud and let your body sing.
Natalie Goldberg
#47. I do think better of womankind than to suppose they care whether Mister John Keats five feet high likes them or not.
John Keats
#48. Notwithstanding the prevalent notion that the French poets are the sympathetic heirs of classic culture, it appears to me that they are not so imbued with the true classic spirit, art, and mythology as some of our English poets, notably Keats and Shelley.
William Shakespeare
#49. Eight years ago, I was drawn into Keats's world by Andrew Motion's biography. Soon I was reading back and forth between Keats's letters and his poems. The letters were fresh, intimate and irreverent, as though he were present and speaking. The Keats spell went very deep for me.
Jane Campion
#50. Shelley and Keats were the last English poets who were at all up to date in their chemical knowledge.
John B. S. Haldane
#51. With "poets dead and gone" as Keats says in "Mermaid Tavern" they are alive and talking to us and us to them.
Gregory Orr
#52. When I read Andrew Motion's biography, I wept. It's something about the purity of the story and how fresh it was because of the love letters Keats wrote.
Jane Campion
#53. I am tired of this city. I am tired of its pagan pretensions and false histories. Hyperion is a poet's world devoid of poetry. Keats itself is a mixture of tawdry, false classicism and mindless, boomtown energy.
Dan Simmons
#54. Culture is like the sum of special knowledge that accumulates in any large united family and is the common property of all its members. When we of the great Culture Family meet, we exchange reminiscences about Grandfather Homer, and that awful old Dr. Johnson, and Aunt Sappho, and poor Johnny Keats.
Aldous Huxley
#55. Her hair was long , her foot was light and her eyes were wild. -Keats
John Keats
#56. Poetry's the speech of kings. You're one of those
Shakespeare gives the comic bits to: prose!
All poetry (even Cockney Keats?) you see
's been dubbed by [Us] into RP,
Received Pronunciation, please believe [Us]
your speech is in the hands of the Receivers.
Tony Harrison
#57. If you read Keats's poems, they're often full of doubts and anxieties. They can be quite tough.
Jane Campion
#58. Who would not spout the family teapot in order to talk with Keats for an hour about poetry, or with Jane Austen about the art of fiction?
Virginia Woolf
#59. If you want to study writing, read Dickens. That's how to study writing, or Faulkner, or D.H. Lawrence, or John Keats. They can teach you everything you need to know about writing.
Shelby Foote
#60. God, listen to him. Fucking pathetic, going on about the girl like he was Keats or something.
Shayla Black
#61. No more Keats, I entreat: flay him alive; if some of you don't I must skin him myself: there is no bearing the drivelling idiotism of the Mankin.
George Gordon Byron
#62. I am a genius who has written poems that will survive with the best of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats.
Irving Layton
#63. Once I worshipped Keats for dying young. Now I think it's braver to die old.
Erica Jong
#64. Make a list of all the lovers you've ever had.
Warren Lasher
Ed "Rubberhead" Catapano
Charles Deats or Keats
Alfonse
Tuck it in your pocket. Leave it lying around, conspicuously. Somehow you lose it. Make "mislaid" jokes to yourself. Make another list.
Lorrie Moore
#65. Touch'd with miseries
She seem'd at once, some penanced lady elf,
Some demon's mistress, or the demon's self.
- Lamia (John Keats)
John Keats
#66. His religion at best is an anxious wish,-like that of Rabelais, a great Perhaps.
John Keats
#67. Though a quarrel in the streets is a thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine; the commonest man shows a grace in his quarrel.
John Keats
#68. A thing of beauty is a joy forever: It's loveliness increases: it will never pass into nothingness. Pleasure is oft a visitant, but pain clings cruelty to us.
John Keats
#69. Besides, a long poem is a test of invention, which I take to be the Polar star of Poetry, as Fancy is the sails - and Imagination the rudder.
John Keats
#70. Bards of Passion and of Mirth, Ye have left your souls on earth! Have ye souls in heaven too, Double-lived in regions new?
John Keats
#71. Of love, that fairest joys give most unrest.
John Keats
#72. Are there not thousands in the world who love their fellows even to the death, who feel the giant agony of the world, and more, like slaves to poor humanity, labor for mortal good?
John Keats
#73. Bold Lover, never, never canst Thou kiss, Though winning near the goalyet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though Thou hast not Thy bliss, Forever wilt Thou love, and she be fair
John Keats
#74. An extensive knowledge is needful to thinking people-it takes away the heat and fever; and helps, by widening speculation, to ease the burden of the mystery.
John Keats
#75. So rainbow-sided, touch'd with miseries,
She seem'd, at once, some penanced lady elf,
Some demon's mistress, or the demon's self.
John Keats
#76. Already with thee! tender is the night ...
But here there is no light ...
John Keats
#77. Severn - I - lift me up - I am dying - I shall die easy; don't be frightened - be firm, and thank God it has come.
John Keats
#78. You are to me an object so intensely desirable that the air I breathe in a room empty of you is unhealthy
John Keats
#79. A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence because he has no identity-he is continually infirming and filling some other body.
John Keats
#80. Oh what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, Alone and palely loitering?
John Keats
#83. It's ridiculous to accept on a blog or in a forum speech what would be seen as hooliganism or delinquency if practiced in a public space."37
Danielle Keats Citron
#84. A little noiseless noise among the leaves, Born of the very sigh that silence heaves.
John Keats
#85. When shall we pass a day alone? I have had a thousand kisses, for which with my whole soul I thank love - but if you should deny me the thousand and first - 'twould put me to the proof how great a misery I could live through.
John Keats
#86. Conversation is not a search after knowledge, but an endeavor at effect.
John Keats
#87. We read fine things but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the author.
John Keats
#88. Ah! dearest love, sweet home of all my fears,
and hopes, and joys, and panting miseries,
Tonight if I may guess, thy beauty wears a smile of such delight,
As brilliant and as bright
As when with ravished, aching, nassal eyes,
Lost in a soft amaze
I gaze, I gaze
John Keats
#89. Wherein lies happiness? In that which becks
Our ready minds to fellowship divine,
A fellowship with essence; till we shine,
Full alchemiz'd, and free of space. Behold
The clear religion of heaven!
John Keats
#90. A moment's thought is passion's passing knell.
John Keats
#91. To feel forever its soft fall and swell, Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever-or else swoon in death.
John Keats
#92. The same that oft-times hath
charm'd magic casements,
opening on the foam
of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn.
John Keats
#93. My spirit is too weak
mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagin'd pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
Like a sick Eagle looking at the sky.
John Keats
#94. It is a flaw In happiness to see beyond our bourn, - It forces us in summer skies to mourn, It spoils the singing of the nightingale.
John Keats
#95. I have loved the principle of beauty in all things.
John Keats
#96. Is there another Life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be we cannot be created for this sort of suffering.
John Keats
#97. No stir of air was there, Not so much life as on a summer's day Robs not one light seed from the feather'd grass, But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.
John Keats
#98. The web of our Life is of mingled Yarn.
John Keats
#99. That queen of secrecy, the violet.
John Keats
#100. I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute.
John Keats
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