Test Your Knowledge on John Keats and 'Ode to a Nightingale'

Biography and Background of John Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale"

• John Keats was born in 1795 in London and was raised in Moorfields.
• Keats attended the Clarke School in Enfield and was apprenticed to an apothecary but realized his true talent was writing.
• He entered Guy's and St. Thomas's Hospitals in London to become a surgeon and supported himself with a small inheritance to pursue writing.
• Keats associated with artists and writers, including Leigh Hunt, who published Keats's first poems in his journal, the Examiner.
• Keats experienced the first symptoms of tuberculosis and fell in love with Fanny Brawne, but his poor health and financial difficulties made marriage impossible.
• He published a final work, "Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems," which included his famous odes and the unfinished narrative, "Hyperion: A Fragment."
• Keats wrote "Ode to a Nightingale" in one day in 1819 under a plum tree in the garden of his house at Wentworth Place in Hampstead.
• The poem was inspired by a nightingale's song near his house and explores the themes of nature, transience, and mortality.
• The nightingale symbolizes the ability to live through song, which humans cannot expect, and the inevitability of death.
• The contrast between the immortal nightingale and mortal man sitting in his garden is made more acute by an effort of imagination.
• The poem was possibly written between April and May 1819, based on weather conditions and similarities between images in the poem and a letter sent to Fanny Brawne.
• Keats finished the ode in one morning after sitting for two or three hours under a plum tree in the garden.