Top 25 Keats Quotes

The good news is that I’ve already outlived two Brontes, Keats, and Stephen Crane. The bad news is that I haven’t written anything.

I began writing poems when I was about eight, with a heavy assist from my mother. She read me Arthur Waley’s translations and Whitman and Robinson Jeffers, who have been lifelong influences on me. My father read Keats to me, and then he read more Keats while I was lying on the sofa struggling with asthma.

I want to read Keats and Wordsworth, Hemingway, George Orwell.

If people connect me with the Romantics in general, they probably connect me most with Keats. But Wordsworth is the poet I admire above all others.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If you read Keats’s poems, they’re often full of doubts and anxieties. They can be quite tough.

I am a genius who has written poems that will survive with the best of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats.

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.

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?

There’s no artist in this world that doesn’t enjoy the dream that if they have bad reviews now, the story of Keats can redeem them, in their fantasy or imagination, in the future. I think Keats’ poem ‘Endymion’ is a really difficult poem, and I’m not surprised that a lot of people pulled it apart in a way.

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.

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.

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.

When we had our first son, four different people gave us the same present: a copy of Ezra Jack Keats’ ‘The Snowy Day.’ A new child often inspires duplicate gifts – we were given a dozen mostly useless baby blankets, just one more thing to spit up on – but this one was different.

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.

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.

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

As for how criticism of Keats’ poetry relates to criticism of my own work, I’ll leave that for others to decide.

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.

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.

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.

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.