The World is Full of Magical Things
Patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
Life Cut Short
John Keats died at the age of twenty-five. His mature writing career spanned a little over four years, including when he was still a teenager — from 19 to 23.
We know many rock stars who burned bright and whose lives were curtailed early on from our own time. We wonder what works they might have produced if they had lived longer. And we can look at other rock stars that had much to say, which embodied the distillation of remarkable life experience, which speak profoundly and intimately. And then they go on to live long lives expressing lesser degrees of insight and inspiration.
Sometimes the trajectory is unsustainable, and a life of enjoyment and ease dilutes the desperate urge and need to be understood. Youth can speak and profoundly so. This urgency drove the gift we have from Keats. It is idle to wonder what more we might have been cheated of by his early death.
Keats published fifty-four poems in three slender volumes and a few magazines during his lifetime. His body of work includes a relative handful of extraordinary poems. He is most well known for the five great odes he wrote in 1819. In these five poems, he brought the English ode to its most perfect form and definition.
