MovieChat Forums > Bright Star (2009) Discussion > How did you discover Keats?

How did you discover Keats?

posted 14 years ago by kressie
35 replies | jump to latest

I am wondering how people on this board discovered Keats -- through the film, through school, through your own reading?

In my case, I had to read the Romantics in high school and I feel deeply in love with Keats. Some of the things he wrote have become truly central to my life. When I first saw that Campion was making a Keats movie, I couldn't believe my eyes. (I was late coming to this board because I couldn't see the movie til just before it closed. Then I saw it twice. Would have squeezed in a matinee if I'd had the time.)

[–] chapmanshomer 12 years ago

I'm 17 and I discovered Keats while perusing and old copy of the Norton Anthology of Poetry. The more I read his poems, the more I fell in love with them, and he soon overcame tough competition (Shelley, Eliot, Coleridge) and became my favorite poet. I adore all of his sonnets, especially 'When I have fears' and 'On first looking into Chapman's Homer', but my favorite poem has to be 'Ode to a Nightingale'. Every time I get to the last line - 'Fled is that music- do I wake or Sleep?' - I get shivers down my spine. Unfortunately, we don't study him in school, and it is mostly my longing to study him that has prompted me to study English in College next year.

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"truly, my Satan, thou art but a dunce"-William Blake

[–] kressie 12 years ago

I agree about "Nightingale." Romantic poems soar by their very nature, but "Nightingale" is the deepest, most daring, most radical, even shocking at times (at least to me). Everything is unexpected, not just the technical twists and turns, but the way Keats binds the frighteningly dark with the ecstatic--perfect. And yes, that last line ... how quickly things that once seemed sure seem insubstantial (but no less beautiful). To me, it makes the poem like the nightingale's music -- something that flashes by and transports us, and then disappears, leaving mystery behind. Nothing in Keats or the other Romantics can compare. (So speaks the amateur. I wish I had majored in English lit. Good luck to you!)

[–] ARH 10 years ago

I have an excellent memory and as a child liked to memorize poems. "Endymion" was in a book that one of my parents had and I memorized it. Though I really became a fan in my teens when I became obsessed with poetry.

[–] HenryCW 9 years ago

I read Keats and Shelley (and a little of Coleridge) in my last year in high school, but knew about him long before that from my parents since they loved his poems. When I was a small kid, my mother often asked me why I was always "alone and loitering" when she saw me wandering around doing nothing in the summer vacations. I wasn't really pale, but that was how I learned the word "loitering".

I also remembered, after one of my first writing exercises in Grade 1 or 2, my teacher asked my mother how such a word as "forlorn" entered into my vocabulary. 

[–] moonbather1971 9 years ago

I just saw this movie today and loved it. My first encounter with Keats was when I was a child. I loved cats, and was given a book called "The Literary Cat." It has a poem in it called "To a Cat." Now I wonder if it was Fanny's cat. I also read some of his poems in a little book my grandmother had called "Fifty Best Poems of England." It was part of a collection of little books that I liked to read when I was visiting her. I always felt very romantic reading those poems while sitting in her back yard.

[–] kressie 9 years ago

I know that sonnet! Its description of the cat is so delicate and specific. A garden or back yard is the perfect place to read it.

I'm glad people are still discovering this movie, as well as Keats.