So the first question is:
Who was Duncan Edwards?
Duncan Edwards was almost the best footballer that ever lived. Okay maybe that is slightly biased. He was almost the best footballer to play for Manchester United. Who said so?
Bobby Charlton did.
Yes, Duncan Edwards was huge, hard as nails, had silky skills but what makes the comparison of him to Keats?
Both were geniuses. Both exceptional in their fields of talent and for the briefest blossoming time. Edwards played and captained United and played for England before being killed in the Munich Air Crash at the age of twenty-one. His talent suggests he was possibly one of the best players ever.
Keats? Keats blossomed over such a short period of time and then went to his grave at the tender age of twenty-six. He published his poetry over the last three years of his life. He didn't start writing until he was eighteen. His poetic talent dragged him away from being a normal lad about town:
"...Was it a silent deep-disguised plot
To steal away, and leave without a task
My idle days? Ripe was the drowsy hour;
The blissful cloud of summer-indolence
Benumb'd my eyes; my pulse grew less and less;
Pain had no sting, and pleasure's wreath no flower.
O, why did ye not melt, and leave my sense
Unhaunted quite of all but - nothingness? ..."
Ode to Indolence
And he didn't do it willingly.
"...For Poesy! - no, - she has not a joy, -
At least for me, - so sweet as drowsy noons,
And evenings steep'd in honied indolence; ..."
But he went on to write marvellous works. The latest movie 'Bright Star' takes its name from one of his sonnets:
"...Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature’s patient sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death..."
Bright Star!
In this we can see Keats' strengths of catching the essence of nature and relationships and love.
His masterpieces were Endymion and Hyperion.
Endymion is a poem by
John Keats first published in
1818. Beginning famously with the line "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever", Endymion, like many epic poems in English is written in rhyming
couplets in
iambic pentameter (also known as
heroic couplets). Keats based the poem on the
Greek myth of
Endymion, the shepherd beloved by the moon goddess
Selene.
Hyperion was a poem that whilst immense is one that Keats struggled with and ultimately abandoned. Again it is mythic in subject matter, this time dealing with the titans.
The American author Dan Simmons used the poems as stimulus to write his amazing quartet of books called
The Hyperion Cantos.
Its easier to sum up Keats by looking at the words of Shelly. Keats was inspired by Shelly and travelled to Italy to live and work with him. It was in Italy that Keats died. Shelly wrote this elegy:
"...He is made one with Nature: there is heard
His voice in all her music; from the moan
Of thunder to the song of night's sweet bird;
He is a presence to be felt and known
In darkness and in light, from herb and stone,
Spreading itself where'er that Power may move
Which has withdrawn his being to its own;
Which wields the world with never wearied love,
Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above. He is a portion of the loveliness
Which once he made more lovely: he doth bear
His part, while the one Spirit's plastic stress
Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there
All new successions to the forms they wear...."
Adonais by Shelly.
Further reading:
Keats by Andrew Motion
Movie rather than the book:?
