As a matter of fact Keats died of consumption. The ravages of this disease in his case were accelerated by his feverish passion for poetry, his love Keats's work affair with Fanny Brawne, financial embarrassments, and only to a slight extent by the inevitable disappointment arising from adverse criticisms. What Byron did for modern Greece in England, Keats may be said to have done for ancient Greece. The beautiful songs of Greece, embodied in "Endymion" and "Hyperion," no less than the enthusiastic odes and sonnets in praise of Hellenic works of art, opened the eyes of many of the contemporaries of Keats to the enduring beauties of Greece. It was in his exquisite "Ode to a Grecian Urn,"that Keats expressed his poetical master passion for beauty:
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Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. |
LORD BYRON
Painted by Maurin
Shortly after Keats's death appeared one of the most beautiful of Shelley's longer poems—"Adonais," written as an elegy on the death of Keats:
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I weep for Adonais—he is dead. "Adonais" Oh, weep for Adonais! though our tears Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head! And thou, sad Hour, selected from all years To mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compeers, And teach them thine own sorrow! Say. "With me Died Adonais; till the Future dares Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be An echo and a light unto eternity." |
Wilhelm Meister
Other literary events of the year were the publication of Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister's Wander Jahre," and of Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin's first long poem, "Ruslan and Ludmilla." In this epic, written during Pushkin's early banishment to Bessarabia, an old Russian theme of the heroic times of Kiev Rise of romantic literature was treated much after the manner of Byron's romantic examples. In France the romantic period in literature was inaugurated by young Victor Hugo, who, but the year before, had been crowned as "Maître des jeux floraux" for a prize poem on Henri IV. Now Chateaubriand, in his journal "Le Conservateur," welcomed him as "Un enfant sublime." By his own romantic Victor Hugo followers Hugo was hailed as chief of their poetic "Bataillon Sacré." During the same year the poet, then barely nineteen, married Mademoiselle Foucher, a girl of fifteen.
Death of Napoleon