Complete Poems and Selected Letters Quotes

“The excellence of every Art is its intensity.”
― John Keats, Complete Poems and Selected Letters

“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.”
― John Keats, Complete Poems and Selected Letters

“Can death be sleep, when life is but a dream,
And scenes of bliss pass as a phantom by?
---"On death”
― John Keats, Complete Poems and Selected Letters

“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.”
― John Keats, Complete Poems and Selected Letters

“Oh ye! Who have your eye-balls vexed and tired,
Feast them upon the wideness of the sea”
― John Keats, Complete Poems and Selected Letters

“How beautiful, if sorrow had not made Sorrow more Beautiful than Beauty’s self.”
― John Keats, Complete Poems and Selected Letters

“In passing however I must say of one thing that has pressed upon me lately and encreased my Humility and capability of submission and that is this truth - Men of Genius are great as certain ethereal Chemicals operating on the Mass of neutral intellect - but they have not any individuality, any determined Character - I would call the top and head of those who have a proper self Men of Power.”
― John Keats, Complete Poems and Selected Letters

“The silvery tears of April? Youth of May?
Or June that breathes out life for butterflies?”
― John Keats, Complete Poems and Selected Letters

“This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—
I hold it towards you. These lines were written by someone who knew, at the moment of writing, that the “warm” hand with which he could touch another person would soon be “cold” and unable to grasp anyone, anything. He reaches out for contact because he can’t stand it. He is distraught, enraged, terrified. He would prove to you, whoever “you” are, that he still exists: “see here it is,” he declares, interrupting himself, urgently holding out his hand: “I hold it towards you.” The fury behind this gesture is immense—the fury of the desire to live, the fury of the consciousness of death, the fury that some love might have assuaged all this suffering. Keats keeps the desperation going in this lyric: he embodies it in a Shakespearean rhetoric. The desperation gives voltage to the well-wrought lines, almost lifting them off the page, almost scorching them. I hear it in the beseeching, agonized, infuriated voice. I feel it incarnated in the physical image of his once-living hand. He holds his hand toward you—toward each of us—in a fierce and plaintive gesture of poetry that tries to go beyond poetry. One imagines his hand moving furiously across the page and then suddenly stopping. The truth was intolerable. The reality that his actual hand would be replaced by these living lines of poetry seems to have given him no comfort. Still, these lines must carry as much of him as possible now; they are all that is left. The poet perceived this in advance. He gave his word for it.”
― John Keats, Complete Poems and Selected Letters

“I’ll feel my heaven anew,”
― John Keats, Complete Poems and Selected Letters