Tag Archives: John Keats

Fall Poem: Actor Ralph Richardson Reads John Keats’ “Ode to Autumn” After Reflecting on Old Age and Death

Ralph Richardson died in 1983 at the age of 81, so this clip is from the mid-1970s.

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James Wood: Literature Complexifies the Atheist-Theist Debate

In a recent essay for the Guardian, Harvard English professor, James Wood, identifies four ways that literature complexifies the atheist-theist debate. As Wood sees it, literary writers tend to: explore fluctuations in the human psyche; track messy mixtures of truth and error; imaginatively walk in … Continue reading

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Was Keats Right? Surfer-Physicist Garrett Lisi’s TED Talk

The poet John Keats famously wrote, at the end of his “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, the following: Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. I’m not sure this … Continue reading

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“There Was an Awful Rainbow Once in Heaven”: A Double Rainbow Triggers a Man’s Confrontation with the Ontological Mystery, and Recalls for Me Some Lines from John Keats

The man’s response to the double rainbow recalls for me some lines from John Keats. In “Lamia” are these cautioning lines (231-238) against a too-eager reductionism: There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: We know her woof, her texture; … Continue reading

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21st Century Bohemian Hippie Joy

The liberated body and free-flowing consciousness. The hope of the world: When I watch this I think of John Keats’s famous lines from “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all … Continue reading

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Santi Tafarella’s Poem, “The Appearance of the Real”

. . . . . . .                                                                                                                                                                 . Beneath a dormant tree in brown eggshell crisp leaves a child found a white branch with a red blossom.                                                                                                                                                        . The branch bent at its middle and the child, to hold … Continue reading

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Was Emily Dickinson an Atheist?

In the December 2009-January 2010 dead tree edition of Free Inquiry (on pages 47-48), Gary Sloan, a retired English professor, did an interesting investigative piece on Emily Dickinson’s relationship to religion. I thought his conclusion quite delicious (because it mirrors my own relationship … Continue reading

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An Atheist Writes a Poem to the Dark Ontological Mystery: Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” (1816)

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem, “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” (1816), is an extraordinary instance of an atheist addressing—or speaking to—the shadowy side of the ontological mystery (the mystery of being) as if it possessed a human persona, or was even a god. The poem … Continue reading

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John Keats on the 1781 Discovery of Uranus

In a Slate.com review of Richard Holmes’s new book on Romanticism and science, the reviewer notes a reference to astronomer William Herschel’s discovery of the planet Uranus in one of John Keats’s sonnets: In Keats’ sonnet “On First Looking Into … Continue reading

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Negative Capability Defined: Walking in Mysteries—and the Shoes of Others—with Keats, Shakespeare, Whitman—and Barack Obama!

In a letter dated 22 December, 1817, the poet John Keats coined the term “negative capability” and defined it this way: I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & … Continue reading

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