This is an announcement I post to my students each semester. As I was posting this for the spring, I thought it contains some advice we all can be reminded of:

There is an important life lesson buried in these assignments. It is to challenge yourself to do your best work.

Take the discussions seriously and thoughtfully. Practice your writing and communication skills. Remember, there is no good writing, only re-writing.

Go the extra mile in the group work. Use this as a laboratory for navigating team and personal dynamics. …

In October 1817, John Keats returned to London with a new purposefulness. He was steadily working on Endymion and planning another long poem.

But the world was too much with him in London. In October 1817, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine printed an article “On the Cockney School of Poetry”. It was the first of several attacks on Hunt and his circle by John Gibson Lockhart and John Wilson. His association with Hunt created ill public criticism for Keats.

On top of this, Keats’s brother Tom now clearly had tuberculosis, and his brother George was out of work and needing money. He…

Yes. We should all always prepare for a severe market turndown. To be prepared is to be forewarned. Forewarned is forearmed. Preparation prevents piss poor performance.

A downturn is inevitable. We know the market behaves cyclically, and corrections are part of the circle.

That being said, we have no idea when it’s going to occur. It’s like the sword of Damocles hanging over our collective heads. If we prepare, take it as inevitable, and don’t freak out and sell when it happens, we can weather the storm.

It’s like a rainstorm. When it occurs, we put on our inclement weather…

That month of October, besides writing his first great poem, Keats met Leigh Hunt. Hunt recalled their initial encounter

“the impression made upon me by the exuberant specimens of genuine though young poetry that were laid before me, and the promise of which was seconded by the fine fervid countenance of the writer. We became intimate on the spot, and I found the young poet’s heart as warm as his imagination.”

Clarke called it:

“a red-letter day’ in the young poet’s life, and one which will never fade with me while memory lasts. . . . …

In early October 1816, a good friend Cowden Clarke shared with John Keats an extraordinary antique volume circulating among London’s literati: a 1616 folio edition of the Elizabethan playwright George Chapman’s translation of Homer. This book was just over two hundred years old at the time. The book was a look into the past and a glorious achievement.

The two friends, fascinated and invigorated, pored over the text until morning. When Keats got home, he immediately composed a sonnet, “On the first looking into Chapman’s Homer.” …

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. …

John Keats desired to speak to and engage with the deepest parts of our being and help us find solace in a painful world.

Perhaps his greatest poems can best be understood by the insight and illumination provided in a passage from a letter Keats wrote to his bother in the spring of 1819. In this letter, Keats reasons why there is suffering in the world and how we can embrace melancholy as a state of soul creation. He calls this state, “The Vale of Soul-making.”

Because of his family’s history of illness, his medical training, and the epidemic of…

It is difficult;

To get the news from poems;

Yet men die miserably every day;

For lack;

Of what is found there.

William Carlos Williams

John Keats is known as one of the most eminent lyric poets in English. He died when he was just 25. Keats developed as a poet with astonishing rapidity and experienced one of the most startling creative surges in humankind’s cultural annals. In a twelve-month span, he wrote some of the greatest poems in the English language.

He also left a treasure trove of letters. John Keats’ letters contain a remarkable record of his intimate…