Keats (1795-1821)

Keats (1795-l821)

Beauty is the central theme in fact in the final couplet we can find it.

Keats's reputation:

When Keats died he was hardly known, his works were neglected, but late the critics started that had he lived longer he would have become the greatest of the romantic poets, if not of all times. His work shows surprising maturity and imaginative power.

Role of imagination:

He believed in the supreme value of imagination.

Imagination takes 2 forms:

the world of his poetry is mainly artificial besides he showed his love or fondness for the strange, weir, unfamiliar remote in both place and time.

His poetry stems from imagination in the sense that his work is a vision of what he would like human life to be like, stimulated by his experience of pain and misery.

Substance of his poetry:

There is some personal experience behind his poems but the experience is behind not their substance; the poetical person pronoun "I" stands for a universal being. Another feature far from romantic creed: "Scenery is fine but human nature is finer". The common romantic tendency to identify scenes and landscape as an expression of subjective moods and motions is really present in his poems. He is very far from Wordsworth and no sense of mystery.

Physical beauty and spiritual beauty:

We apprehension of beauty from the senses and physical sensations, all the senses not the nobler one; in fact in his ode we have a ure of speech "synaesthesia" in which an image perceived trough one of the five senses is associated with another image involving a different sense. Physical beauty is coach in all the forms nature acquires (colours, perfumes). Beauty can produce a deeper experience of joy, it introduces a spiritual beauty that is the one of love and friendship. Through poetry Keats reaches some of permanent and unchanging in the world of mortality. Spirit and beauty are interwoven: physical beauty is linked to life decay and death, spiritual beauty is linked to eternity.

Negative capability:

Is an ability to experience negative elements. When a man can relie on his negative capability he is able to sick sensation which is the bases of knowledge.