Bright Star! Would I Were as Steadfast as Thou Art | Essays and Criticism

  • Keat's Prayer

    Jeannine Johnson received her Ph.D. from Yale University and is currently visiting assistant professor of English at Wake Forest University. In the following essay, Johnson demonstrates that although Keats’s prayer in “Bright star!” goes unanswered, the poet is not disappointed but remains content.

  • Immortality

    Aviya Kushner is the Contributing Editor in Poetry at BarnesandNoble.com and the Poetry Editor of Neworld Magazine. She is a graduate of the acclaimed creative writing program in poetry at Boston University, where she received the Fitzgerald Award in Translation. Her writing on poetry has appeared in Harvard Review and The Boston Phoenix, and she has served as Poetry Coordinator for AGNI Magazine. She has given readings of her own work throughout the United States, and she teaches at Massachusetts Communications College in Boston. In the following essay, Kushner describes the sonnet as expressing Keats’s desire to have the “steadfastness” and immortality of a star and of a Shakespeare, able to look upon one’s love and to be remembered for one’s verses for eternity.

  • Variations on Human Identity

    David Kelly is an instructor of Creative Writing at several community colleges in Illinois, as well as a fiction writer and playwright. In this essay, he examines the variations on human identity that John Keats explores in the sonnet “Bright Star!” and how death is the logical end.

  • Brightest Star, Sweet Unrest: Image and Consolation in Wordsworth

    In this excerpt, Roe argues that Keats’s sonnet, although written to his beloved, is more than just a love poem. Rather, it contains the author’s central themes of beauty and mortality.