Complete Works of John Keats Quotes

“A clammy dew is beading on my brow,
At mere remembering her pale laugh, and curse.
“Ha! ha! Sir Dainty! there must be a nurse
Made of rose leaves and thistledown, express,
To cradle thee my sweet, and lull thee: yes,
I am too flinty-hard for thy nice touch:
My tenderest squeeze is but a giant’s clutch.”
― John Keats, Complete Works of John Keats

“Have not the last three years been an utterly unprecedented, overwhelming and transforming experience for mankind? Will not the new world after the war be a new world indeed, on the one hand filled, nay, gorged, with recollections of doing and undergoing, of endurance and adventure, of daring and suffering and horror, of hellishness and heroism, beside which all the dreams of bygone romance must forever seem tame and vapid; and on the other hand straining with a hungry forecast towards a future of peace and justice such as mankind has not known before, which it will be its tremendous task to try and establish? Will not this world of so prodigiously intensified experiences and enlarged hopes and besetting anxieties require and produce new poets and a new poetry of its own that shall deal with the realities it has gone through and those it is striving for, and put away and cease to care for the old dreams and thrills and glamours of romance?”
― John Keats, Complete Works of John Keats

“Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,”
― John Keats, Complete Works of John Keats

“Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine —
Unweave a rainbow,”
― John Keats, Complete Works of John Keats

“On the green of the hill
We will drink our fill
Of golden sunshine,
Till our brains intertwine
With the glory and grace of Apollo!”
― John Keats, Complete Works of John Keats

“John Gibson Lockhart, writing in Blackwood’s Magazine, described Endymion as “imperturbable drivelling idiocy”. With biting sarcasm, Lockhart advised, “It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr John, back to plasters, pills, and ointment boxes”
― John Keats, Complete Works of John Keats

“yet I must not forget
Sleep, quiet with his poppy coronet:
For what there may be worthy in these rhymes
I partly owe to him:”
― John Keats, Complete Works of John Keats

“forgotten? Yes, a schism
Nurtured by foppery and barbarism,
Made great Apollo blush for this his land.”
― John Keats, Complete Works of John Keats

“contemporaries, that Wordsworth, etc., should have their due from us. But, for the sake of a few fine imaginative or domestic passages, are we to be bullied into a certain Philosophy engendered in the whims of an Egotist? Every man has his speculations, but every man does not brood and peacock over them till he makes a false coinage and deceives himself. Many a man can travel to the very bourne of Heaven, and yet want confidence to put down his half-seeing. Sancho will invent a Journey heavenward as well as anybody. We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us, and, if we do not agree, seems to put its hand into its breeches pocket. 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. How beautiful are the retired flowers! — how would they lose their beauty were they to throng into the highway, crying out, “Admire me, I am a violet! Dote upon me, I am a primrose!” Modern poets differ from the Elizabethans”
― John Keats, Complete Works of John Keats

“I am a shadow now, alas! alas!
Upon the skirts of human-nature dwelling
Alone: I chant alone the holy mass,
While little sounds of life are round me knelling,
And glossy bees at noon do fieldward pass,
And many a chapel bell the hour is telling, 310
Paining me through: those sounds grow strange to me,
And thou art distant in Humanity.”
― John Keats, Complete Works of John Keats

“There was Lorenzo slain and buried in,
There in that forest did his great love cease;
Ah! when a soul doth thus its freedom win,
It aches in loneliness — is ill at peace 220”
― John Keats, Complete Works of John Keats

“And must not, it may be asked, all this labour spent upon Keats’ memory and remains, all this load of editing and re-editing and commentary and biography and scholiast-work laid upon a poet who declared that all poems ought to be understood without any comment, — must it not by this time have fairly smothered, or is it not at least in danger of smothering, Keats himself and his poetry?”
― John Keats, Complete Works of John Keats

“Elizabeth Barrett Browning, paid in Aurora Leigh (1857) her well-known tribute to Keats in lines that are neither good as poetry nor accurate as fact, but in their chaotic way none the less passionately felt and haunting: — By Keats’ soul, the man who never stepped In gradual progress like another man, But, turning grandly on his central self, Ensphered himself in twenty perfect years And died, not young, (the life of a long life Distilled to a mere drop, falling like a tear Upon the world’s cold cheek to make it burn For ever;) by that strong accepted soul, I count it strange and hard to understand That nearly all young poets should write old.”
― John Keats, Complete Works of John Keats

“In the fam’d memoirs of a thousand years,
Written by Crafticant, and published
By Parpaglion and Co., (those sly compeers
Who rak’d up ev’ry fact against the dead,)
In Scarab Street, Panthea, at the Jubal’s Head.”
― John Keats, Complete Works of John Keats

“O soft embalmer of the still midnight,”
― John Keats, Complete Works of John Keats

“Away, ye horrid moods!
Moods of one’s mind! You know I hate them well.
You know I’d sooner be a clapping bell
To some Kamtschatcan missionary church,
Than with these horrid moods be left i’ the lurch.”
― John Keats, Complete Works of John Keats

“When the pig is over-roasted,
Huzza for folly O!
And the cheese is over-toasted,
Huzza for folly O!”
― John Keats, Complete Works of John Keats

“There’s a blush for won’t, and a blush for shan’t,
And a blush for having done it:
There’s a blush for thought and a blush for naught,
And a blush for just begun it.”
― John Keats, Complete Works of John Keats

“Names, deeds, gray legends, dire events, rebellions,
Majesties, sovran voices, agonies,
Creations and destroyings, all at once
Pour into the wide hollows of my brain,
And deify me, as if some blithe wine
Or bright elixir peerless I had drunk,
And so become immortal.”
― John Keats, Complete Works of John Keats

“A voice came sweeter, sweeter than all tune,
And still it cried, ‘Apollo! young Apollo!
The morning-bright Apollo! young Apollo!”
― John Keats, Complete Works of John Keats

“sidelong fix’d her eye on Saturn’s face:
There saw she direst strife; the supreme God
At war with all the frailty of grief,
Of rage, of fear, anxiety, revenge,
Remorse, spleen, hope, but most of all despair.”
― John Keats, Complete Works of John Keats

“Pale wox I, and in vapours hid my face.
Art thou, too, near such doom? vague”
― John Keats, Complete Works of John Keats

“O aching time! O moments big as years!
All as ye pass swell out the monstrous truth,”
― John Keats, Complete Works of John Keats

“Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty’s self.
There was a listening fear in her regard,
As if calamity had but begun;
As if the vanward clouds of evil days
Had spent their malice, and the sullen rear 40
Was with its stored thunder labouring up.”
― John Keats, Complete Works of John Keats

“yet let us sing,
Honour to the old bow-string! 50
Honour to the bugle-horn!
Honour to the woods unshorn!
Honour to the Lincoln green!
Honour to the archer keen!
Honour to tight little John,
And the horse he rode upon!
Honour to bold Robin Hood,”
― John Keats, Complete Works of John Keats

“In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. 70”
― John Keats, Complete Works of John Keats

“Then Lamia breath’d death breath; the sophist’s eye,
Like a sharp spear, went through her utterly, 300
Keen, cruel, perceant, stinging: she, as well”
― John Keats, Complete Works of John Keats

“Left to herself, the serpent now began
To change; her elfin blood in madness ran,
Her mouth foam’d, and the grass, therewith besprent,
Wither’d at dew so sweet and virulent;
Her eyes in torture fix’d, and anguish drear, 150
Hot, glaz’d, and wide, with lid-lashes all sear,
Flash’d phosphor and sharp sparks,”
― John Keats, Complete Works of John Keats

“he found a palpitating snake,
Bright, and cirque-couchant in a dusky brake.  She was a gordian shape of dazzling hue,
Vermilion-spotted, golden, green, and blue;
Striped like a zebra, freckled like a pard,
Eyed like a peacock, and all crimson barr’d; 50
And full of silver moons, that, as she breathed,
Dissolv’d, or brighter shone, or interwreathed
Their lustres with the gloomier tapestries —
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.
Upon her crest she wore a wannish fire
Sprinkled with stars, like Ariadne’s tiar:
Her head was serpent, but ah, bitter-sweet!
She had a woman’s mouth with all its pearls complete: 60”
― John Keats, Complete Works of John Keats

“Into the wide stream came of purple hue–
’Twas Bacchus and his crew!
The earnest trumpet spake, and silver thrills
From kissing cymbals made a merry din– 200
’Twas Bacchus and his kin!”
― John Keats, Complete Works of John Keats