JOHN KEATS
John
Keats was an English Romantic poet. He was one of the main figures of the
second generation of romantic poets along with Lord
Byron and Percy Bysshe
Shelley, despite his work only having been in
publication for four years before his death.
Although his poems were not generally well received by critics during his life, his reputation grew after his death, so that by the end of the 19th century he had become one of the most beloved of all English poets. He had a significant influence on a diverse range of later poets and writers. Jorge Luis Borges stated that his first encounter with Keats was the most significant literary experience of his life.
The poetry of Keats is characterized by sensual imagery, most notably in the series of odes. Today his poems and letters are some of the most popular and most analyzed in English literature.
CHARACTERISTICS OF JOHN KEATS POETRY
The poetry of Keats is an unending
pursuit of beauty. He pursued truth indeed, but truth for him was beauty. He
never intellectualised his poetry. He was gifted with extraordinary sensibility
and had an ardent passion for the beauty of the visible world. He therefore
cried, "O for a life of sensation rather than of thought" (It may be
mentioned here that Keats uses the word 'thought' in the sense of abstract
reasoning or speculation.) His entire being was thrilled by the beauty of the
world ; nothing gave him greater delight than the excitement of his sense,
produced by 'a thing of beauty'.
All his poetry is full of the sensuous
appeal of beautiful things. To Wordsworth nature is a living being with power
to influence the human mind, and carrying a spiritual message. Shelley, though
not a moralist, is an idealist—"The poet of the sky and the sea and the
cloud—the gold of dawn and the gloom of earthquake and eclipse." The world
that he depicts and makes symbolic of human passions—is rarely the world that
we know, but it is a world that he has intensely imagined. His grand
description, of the effects of the west wind, is a great poetry.
O Wild West Wind, thou breath of
Autumn's being.
But the beauty and grandeur of the west
wind goes beyond our actual experience. When we turn to Keats's Ode to Autumn,
we are brought into imaginative contact with beauty that we know. Autumn is
represented by Keats by its familiar qualities : "mist and mellow
fruitfulness". Realism and truth inform every detail of the poem. Keats
neither attributes moral life to nature, nor attempts to pass beyond her
familiar manifestations. He, the pure poet that he is, sees and presents nature
as she is, and his presentation has that magic quality with which his
imagination has supremely endowed him.
Spontaneity and concentration of thought and feeling.
Keats was a pure poet in the sense that
in his poetry he was a poet and nothing else—not a teacher, not a preacher, not
a conscious carrier of any humanitarian or spiritual message. His ambition was
to become a poet, pure and simple and his ambition was fulfilled. Poetry came
naturally to him, as leaves come to a tree ; it was the spontaneous utterance
of his powerful feeling. The poetry of Keats x was based on his actual
experience of life, and therefore it is marked by spontaneity and intensity.
What he experienced and felt upon his
pulse he expressed. He actually listened to the song of a nightingale, and the
music of the song actually transported him to the world of imagination. He
attained the realisation of eternity and truth in the beauty of the song, and
he wrote the famous line, "thou wast not born for death, immortal
bird". Much has been written about the logical falacy of the line, but
what did the poet in Keats care ? What he felt he wrote. Keats genuinely felt
the thought that a beautiful thing also pleases, and so he wrote, 'A thing of
beauty is a joy for ever9. And because he felt the truth of what he wrote, it
carries an instant conviction and is in itself a joy for ever. In fact, the
power of Keats's poetry is due to intense concentration of thought and
feelingl
Submission to the truth of life and experience
Keats possessed what Bradley calls
"the Shakespeare on strain", and submitted to the truth of life. He
knew that the cold wind and the hot sun were as essential as the fresh blown
rose. The poetry of Shakespeare reveals the beauty of life ; truth is beauty,
it says. It accepts the world of men and women and accepts them as they are.
This is also true of Keats. He accepted life as it is, joy and sorrow,
happiness and melancholy—both exist side by side ; if there is discord in life,
it has its music too. A pure poet always submits to life, so that life is
glorified through him. "Keats submitted himself" says Middleton
Murry, "Steadily, persistently, unflinchingly to life" and had
"the capacity to see and to feel what life is."
A pure poet feels and expresses his joy
in beauty, but when he feels this joy, he realises also a new aspect of beauty,
which is truth. In this identity of Beauty and Truth lies the secret harmony of
the universe. Keats realises this harmony when he emphatically says,
Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty,—that is
all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to
know.
Beauty transcends individuals, time and
space. For Keats, Beauty is truth. He arrived at this truth through 'negative
capability' and through realisation of the necessity of pain and sorrow. A pure
poet like Keats loves foul and fair, joy and sorrow, mean and elevated alike.
He turns unflinchingly to life and human experiences, and by an act of
imagination transmutes the bitterest human experience into beauty which is
truth.
We may in conclusion quote a few lines
from T.S. Eliot to show the contrast between Wordsworth and Shelley on the one
hand mid Knits:
Wordsworth had a very delicate
sensibility to social life and social change. Wordsworth and Shelley both
theorise. Keats had no theory, and to have one was irrelevant to his interests,
and alien to his mind. If we take either Wordsworth or Shelley as
representative of his age, as being a voice of the age, we cannot so take Keats.
But we cannot accuse Keats of any withdrawal or refusal ; he was merely about
his business." His business was that of a pure poet.
Pursuit of truth
But Keats's aestheticism was not only
sensuous—it had an intellectual element. He was constantly endeavouring to
reach truth through beauty; he had a conviction that "for his progress
towards truth, thought, knowledge and philosophy were indispensable.” But he
felt also that "a poet will never be
able to rest in thoughts and reasonings, which do not also satisfy imagination
and give a truth which is also beauty. But in so far as they fail to do this,
in so far as they are thoughts and reasonings, they are no more than a means to
an end, which end is beauty—that beauty which is also truth. This alone is the
poet's end and therefore his law." (Bradley).
Keats was led to this conviction by the poetic instinct in him. He was more
than Wordsworth or Coleridge or Shelley, a poet pure and simple.
Negative capability
Keats has an impulse to interest himself
in anything he saw or heard. He accepted it and identified himself with it
"If a sparrow comes before my window," say Keats, "I take part
in its existence and pick about the gravel." A poet, he says, has no
identity. He is continually in, for and filling some other body. "Of the
poetic character," Keats says, "it has no self; it is every thing and
nothing. It enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high
or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated. It has as much delight in conceiving an
Iago or Imogen.
What shocks the virtuous philosopher
delights the chamelion poet." This is the spirit of Shakespeare. Though
Keats did not fully achieve this ideal, he was growing towards it. For Keats,
the necessary quality of poetry is a submission to things as they are, without
any effort to intellectualise them into something else. Keats and the nightingale
are merged into one—it is his soul that sings in the bird. He was wholly in the
place and in the time and with the things of which he wrote. He could be
absorbed wholly in the loveliness of the hour and the joy of the moment. (He is
fully thrilled by the beauty of autumn. He does not complain.
Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where
are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music
too.
This joy in the present, this absorption
in the beauty of the hour-is one of the chief marks of his genius as a pure
poet.
No moral teaching or didacticism
Keats often says that the poet must not
live for himself, but must feel for others, and must do good but he must do so
by being a poet—not by being a teacher or moralist. He must have a purpose of
doing good by his poetry, but he must not obtrude it in his poetry—that is, he
must not show that he has palpable design upon us. Keats says: "We hate
poetry that has a palpable design upon us. Poetry should be great and
unobtrusive— a thing which enters into one's soul and does not startle
it". To make beauty, says Bradley, is his (poet's) philanthropy. He must
be unselfish; by refusing, that is, to be diverted from his poetic way of
helping by his desire to help in another way. Hence there is no didacticism in
Keats as there is in Wordsworth. There is no moralising in The Eve of St. Agnes
as there is none in King Lear; in both, the poets leave their works to speak
for themselves.
Keat's poetical achievement
Keats's influence has been very strong
from Tennyson to the present time. His emphasis upon craftsmanship has had
excellent following. Many a poet has been led through the example of Keats to
perfect verse that might otherwise have been carelessly written. Keats also
turned attention to richness of verse, unlike the simplicity of Wordsworth.
Again, he taught a new use of the classics. Instead of finding in the classics
models for restraint he found a highly coloured romanticism. Restraint of form
he did emphasize, but for his material he chose the legends of Endymion and
Lamia rather than the tales of Greeks and Romans of inspiring deeds.
Keats's greatest achievement, however,
is in his presentation of pure beauty. Beauty itself was his interest, not
beauty to point a moral or to carry a message. Keats had no lesson to teach. He
did not want to call his readers' attentions to social wrongs as Shelley did;
to the corrupt state of society as Byron did, to nature as a great moral
teacher as Wordsworth did. Because of this lack of bias, his poems have an
objective beauty which is especially attractive to young people. But to readers
of all ages Keats sings enduring music.
The underlying principle of all Keats's
poetic thought is this: "Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty". In one of
his letters he says: "I have loved the principle of beauty in all
things". But his "passion for the beautiful" was not that of the
sensuous or sentimental man, it was an intellectual and spiritual passion.
There was a deep melancholy about him, too; pain and beauty were the two
intensest experiences of his mind. "Do you not see", he writes,
"how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school are intelligence
and make it a soul?" Keats studied the Elizabethans, mid "caught their turn of thought, and really saw
things with their sovereign eye. He rediscovered the delight and wonder that
lay enchanted in a dictionary" (Lowell). "There is something of the innermost soul of poetry in almost everything
he wrote". (Tennyson).
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