Bright Star! Would I Were as Steadfast as Thou Art | 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.

Sonnet Written on a Blank Page in Shakespeare's Poems
The oldest son of a stable-keeper, the great poet John Keats devoted himself to poetry at the age of twenty-one. Tragically, after five years of feverish writing and significant publication, Keats died at twenty-six—a victim of consumption.

The fact of his early death colors the reading of many of Keats's most accomplished poems, and even their rapturous moments tend to appear tinged with the sorrow of impending doom. Though he continued to write magnificent odes which address truth, beauty, and the lure of...


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