Why is Keats a great poet?

John Keats was an English Romantic lyric poet whose verse is known for its vivid imagery and great sensuous appeal. His reputation grew after his early death, and he was greatly admired in the Victorian Age. His influence can be seen in the poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and the Pre-Raphaelites, among others.

What did Keats say about Shakespeare?

First among these men of genius, for Keats, was Shakespeare, who possessed negative capability ‘so enormously’. When he was beginning his first long poem, Endymion, on the Isle of Wight in 1817, Keats imagined Shakespeare as the genius presiding over him.

Was Keats a good poet?

Although he died at the age of twenty-five, Keats had perhaps the most remarkable career of any English poet. Although he is now seen as part of the British Romantic literary tradition, in his own lifetime Keats would not have been associated with other major Romantic poets, and he himself was often uneasy among them.

How was John Keats influenced by Shakespeare?

The Romantic poet John Keats (1795-1821) was so influenced by Shakespeare that he kept a bust of the Bard beside him while he wrote, hoping that Shakespeare would spark his creativity. Keats’s poems duplicate Shakespeare’s style and are full of Shakespearean imagery.

What was meant by John Keats comment that Shakespeare possessed negative capability?

Keats coined the term negative capability in a letter he wrote to his brothers George and Tom in 1817. Inspired by Shakespeare’s work, he describes it as “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

What inspired John Keats?

He had been inspired by a series of recent lectures by Hazlitt on English poets and poetic identity and had also met Wordsworth. Keats may have seemed to his friends to be living on comfortable means, but in reality he was borrowing regularly from Abbey and his friends.