(M.

A English) #JOHN_KEATS (#Romantic_Escapist_and_Pure#Poet_of_Nature)

First the realm Ill pass
Of Flora of Pan, sleep in the grass,
Feed upon apples and strawberries
And choose each pleasure my fancy sees.
(Sleep and Beauty)
Like all romantic poets, Keats seeks an escape in the past. His imagination is
attracted by the ancient Greeks as well as by the glory and splendour of Middle
Ages. He rarely devotes himself to the pressing problems of the present. Hyperion,
Endymion and Lamia are all classical in theme, though romantic in style. Keats
this finds an escape into the past from the oppressive realities of the present.
Also Keats themes are romantic in nature. Most of his poetry is devoted to the
quest of beauty. Love, chivalry, adventure, pathos --- these are some of the themes
of his poems. Another strain that runs through his poetry is the constant fear of
death, which finds very beautiful expression in his sonnet, When I Have Fears.
Another theme of his poetry is disappointment in love, which can be seen in La
Belle Dam Sans Merci.
Like all romantics, Keats loves nature and its varied charms. He transfigures
everything into beauty that he touches with magic hand of chance. He says in Ode
to Nightingale,
Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,
Beauty is Keats religion and he is very romantic is his frank pursuit of beauty and
in that pursuit of beauty, he completely forgets himself and the world around him.
The romantic quality in literature has been defined by Pater as,
The addition of strangeness to the beauty.
All sorts of poetry deals with beauty in one way or the other, but romantic poetry
goes a step ahead and imparts strangeness to the beauty. Keats sees beauty in
ordinary things of nature. Earth, to him, is a place of where beauty renews itself
everyday, the sky is full of huge cloudy symbols of high romance. Keats loves
beauty in the flower, in the stream and in the cloud but he loves it in each thing as
a part of Universal Beauty, which is infinite --- the mighty abstract idea of
Beauty.
Thou was not born for death, immortal bird
The song of the nightingale becomes a symbol of the universal spirit of beauty.
The nightingale is, for Keats, the symbol of unlimited joy, infinite happiness and
universal spirit of beauty. Pursuit of the unknown, the invisible and infinite
inspires the creation of all the romantic poetry of the world.
Last but not least, both in terms of diction and metres, Keats poetic style is
romantic. Though it has classical finish, it possesses that romantic tough of
suggestiveness by which more is meant than meets the ear. Keats has employed
various kinds of metres and stanzaforms in his poetic work. He is one of the
greatest sonneteers in English language and his Odes with their musical flow in
long stanzas, stand as unique specimen of romantic poetry.
Keats was true romantic poet, because his attention was not only beauty but also
truth. He saw beauty in truth and truth in beauty.
Beauty is truth, truth beauty, --- that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
He persistently endeavoured to reconcile the world of imagination with the world
of reality. Therefore, Middleton Murray calls Keats a true romantic.
A pure poet feels and expresses his joy in beauty, but when he feels this joy, he
realizes also a new aspect of beauty, which is truth. In this identity of beauty and
truth, lies the harmony of universe. Keats realizes this harmony when he says that
truth and beauty are the same thing.
Wordsworth and Shelley both had theories but Keats has none. We cannot accuse
Keats of any withdrawal or refusal; he was merely about his business and his
business was that of a pure poet. (T. S. Eliot)
For Keats, the necessary quality of poetry is submission to the things as they are,
without any effort to intellectualize them into something else. 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. There is no
didacticism in Keats as there is in Wordsworth. He delivers what he sees; the
pleasures of seeing nature and beauty.
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too.
At one time he regrets about the songs of Spring and but then he sees the beauties
of Autumn and involves himself in them. He instantly forgets the pain of losing
songs of Spring and starts admiring Autumn.
The idea of French revolution had awakened the youthful passions of both
Wordsworth and Coleridge; they had stirred the wrath of Scott; they had worked
like yeast on Byron. They had brought forth new matters for Shelley who re-
moulded them and turned them into prophecy of the future. There was only one
poet, Keats, of that age who they could not affect in any way whatsoever.
Keats was so preoccupied with beauty that he turned a blind eye to the actualities
of life around him. (Stopeford Brooke)
It is true that Keats poetry does not express the revolutionary ideas of his age, but
Keats was a pure who expressed in his poetry the most worth while part of himself
and it was his vision of beauty, which was also truth to him. If his aim was to
pursue beauty, which was also truth to him, he cannot be called an escapist, for in
pursuing beauty, he pursued truth.
The poetry of Keats shows a gradual process of development. His earlier
experiments in verse are products of youthful imagination, immature and
overcharged with imagery. The young poet has abnormal sensibility, but lacks
experience of life. Endymion opens with the famous line --- A thing of beauty is a
joy forever, it is full of glorious promise but it is lost in shadows and uncertainties,
because it is not based upon experiences of life. In the Odes, Keats poetry
assumes a deeper tone. There he faces the sorrows and sufferings of life. He would
wish for a life of joy and happiness, like that of nightingale.
Fade far away, and quite forget
What thou amongst the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret,
There, where men sit and hear each other groan;
(Ode to Nightingale)
Thus he longed to escape from realities of life, but it was a passing mood that
seized him when he was contrasting the lot of man with that of the nightingale.
Sorrows and sufferings are inevitable in life and he fully realized that escape from
realities of life was neither possible nor desirable. In Hyperion, he wrote:
None can usurp the height .
But those to whom miseries of the world
Are miseries, and will not let them rest.
In a sonnet, he says:
How fevered that man who cannot look
Upon his mortal days with temperate blood.
Keats was trying to attain serenity of mood in the midst of all the sufferings which
he was undergoing in his own life and which he saw all around him. This mood of
serenity is expressed in Ode to Autumn, which accordingly to Middleton
Murray,
The perfect and unforced utterance of the truth contained in the magic words (of
Shakespeare): Ripeness is all.
For Keats, earlier hankering for the world of Flora and Pan for unreflecting
enjoyment of sensuous delights--- is past; he now subjected himself persistently
and unflinchingly to life. He faced life with all uncertainties and contradictions, its
sorrows and joys. The lines ---
Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new love pine at them beyond tomorrow.
(Ode to Nightingale)
are thrilled with aching hopelessness. In Ode to Melancholy, he says,
dwells with beauty --- beauty that must die
Melancholy arises from transience of joy and joy is transient by its nature.
Therefore Keats accepts life as a whole --- with its joys and beauty as well as its
sorrows and despair.
To quote the words of Middleton Murray about Ode on a Grecian Urn,
These lines contain deep wisdom purchase at the full price of deep suffering.
They are symbol and prophecy of a comprehension of human life to which
mankind can attain.
Keats study of Lemprieres Classical Dictionary fully acquainted him with the
Greek mythology; and he loved every bit of it, and freely used it in his poetry. The
stories of Endymion, Lamia and Hyperion, are based upon Greek legends. In his
Ode to Psyche and Ode on a Grecian Urn, the subjects are Greek, and the poet
while expressing his passion for beauty transports himself in his imagination to the
days of ancient Greeks.
But the most important factor is Keats Hellenism was his own Greek temper ---
the inborn temperamental Greekness of his mind. The power of seeing things with
a childs amazement and forgetfulness was the temper of Keats, as it was the
temper of Greeks --- i.e.; half-worship added half-joy.
The instinctive Greekness of Keats mind lies in his passionate pursuit of beauty,
which is the very soul of his poetry. His passion for beauty finds a concrete
expression in his Ode to Psyche:
Yes, I will be thy priest and buld a fane
In some untrodden regions of my mind,
Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain
Instead of pine shall murmur in the wind.
The Greek did not burden their poetry with philosophy or spiritual message. Their
poetry was incarnation of beauty, and existed for itself. Similarly, Keats was pure
poet. He enjoyed unalloyed pleasure in nature, which for him, did not carry any
philosophical or spiritual message.
Concluding it, Keats, possesses the qualities of romantic and pure poet he loves
nature, which is seen by him with Greek temper. He never thinks about past and
future and his only concern is the present time; the present moment of beauty and
truth. In his early poetry, one can perceive him as an escapist because there was joy
and delight and overcharged imagination because of inexperience youth. But with
gradual development of thought and experience, he comes to the conclusion that
sorrows and joys are always together; rose cannot be taken without its thrones. One
can clearly sees in his Odes that he is not an escapist but he is accepting the
realities of life.
There is something of the innermost soul of poetry in almost everything he
wrote. (Tennyson)
Critical Appreciation of Ode to Nightingale
"Ode to a Nightingale" is a very famous poem by Keats. It was written in 1819.
The proper subject of the poem is not the so called bird but of the whole
humanity. The poet finds himself in a painful situation while hearing the sweet
song of the bird. The poet participates in the happiness of the bird. He creates an
unbridgeable gap between human beings and birds.
The Poet wants to lose himself into the happy spirit of the bird and wants to leave
the world.
He also wants to fade away into the dim Forest.
He proposes this with the help of a cup of special wine that has been cooled in
deep earth. The poet wants to live a life without trouble and worries. He wants to
leave, fret, fear, and weariness. He shows how youth are losing their capacity in
the beginning. But then second thought comes in his mind, he thinks wine is not
proper method of escapism from the reality of the world. He prefers the medium of
poetry for the escapism.
This is a very good poem of romantic era.
The poet style of Keats plays a very important role in this poem. He finds mortality
in the world of human beings.
There is music of life in this poem.
Ode_to_Autumn_By_John_Keats
#Critique_and_Analysis/ #Faultless_construction_and #masterpiece.
Keats was inspired to write Ode to Autumn after walking through the water
meadows of Winchester, England, in an early autumn evening of 1819. The poem
has three stanzas of eleven lines describing the taste, sights and sounds of autumn.
Much of the third stanza, however, is dedicated to diction, symbolism, and literary
devices with decisively negative connotations, as it describes the end of the day
and the end of autumn. The author makes an intense description of autumn at least
at first sight.
The first stanza begins showing this season as misty and fruitful, which, with the
help of a maturing sun, ripens the fruit of the vines. Next, we can see clearly a
hyperbole. Keats writes that a tree has so many apples that it bends, while the
gourds swell and the hazel shells plumps. The poem widely has been considered a
masterpiece of Romantic English poetry. Harold Bloom described it as: "the most
perfect shorter poem in the English language." Conciseness is reflected as follows:
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease?
Keats suggests that the bees have a large amount of flowers. And these flowers did
not bud in summer but now, in autumn. As a consequence, the bees are incessantly
working and their honeycombs are overflowing since summer. In both its form and
descriptive surface, "To Autumn" is one of the simplest of Keats's odes. There is
nothing confusing or complex in Keats's paean to the season of autumn, with its
fruitfulness, its flowers, and the song of its swallows gathering for migration. The
extraordinary achievement of this poem lies in its ability to suggest, explore, and
develop a rich abundance of themes without ever ruffling its calm, gentle, and
lovely description of autumn. Where "Ode on Melancholy" presents itself as a
strenuous heroic quest, "To Autumn" is concerned with the much quieter activity
of daily observation and appreciation. In this quietude, the gathered themes of the
preceding odes find their fullest and most beautiful expression. Keatss approach
here is particular as the line shows:
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
"To Autumn" takes up where the other odes leave off. Like the others, it shows
Keats's speaker paying homage to a particular goddess--in this case, the deified
season of Autumn. The selection of this season implicitly takes up the other odes'
themes of temporality, mortality, and change: Autumn in Keats's ode is a time of
warmth and plenty, but it is perched on the brink of winter's desolation, as the bees
enjoy "later flowers," the harvest is gathered from the fields, the lambs of spring
are now "full grown," and, in the final line of the poem, the swallows gather for
their winter migration. The understated sense of inevitable loss in that final line
makes it one of the most moving moments in all of poetry; it can be read as a
simple, uncomplaining summation of the entire human condition. Despite the
coming chill of winter, the late warmth of autumn provides Keats's speaker with
ample beauty to celebrate: the cottage and its surroundings in the first stanza, the
agrarian haunts of the goddess in the second, and the locales of natural creatures in
the third. Keats's speaker is able to experience these beauties in a sincere and
meaningful way because of the lessons he has learned in the previous odes: He is
no longer attempting to escape the pain of the world through ecstatic rapture (as in
"Nightingale") and no longer frustrated by the attempt to eternalize mortal beauty
or subject eternal beauty to time (as in "Urn"). The poem recalls earlier poems as in
the lines:
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind
In "To Autumn," the speaker's experience of beauty refers back to earlier odes (the
goddess drowsing among the poppies recalls Psyche and Cupid lying in the grass),
but it also recalls a wealth of earlier poems. Most importantly, the image of
Autumn winnowing and harvesting (in a sequence of odes often explicitly about
creativity) recalls an earlier Keats poem in which the activity of harvesting is an
explicit metaphor for artistic creation. In his sonnet "When I have fears that I may
cease to be," Keats makes this connection directly using the metaphor ripen'd
grain. In "To Autumn," the metaphor is developed further; the sense of coming
loss that permeates the poem confronts the sorrow underlying the season's
creativity. When Autumn's harvest is over, the fields will be bare, the swaths with
their "twined flowers" cut down, the cider-press dry, the skies empty. But the
connection of this harvesting to the seasonal cycle softens the edge of the tragedy.
In time, spring will come again, the fields will grow again, and the birdsong will
return. The speaker knows joy and sorrow, song and silence are as intimately
connected as the twined flowers in the fields. Thus the prime note of the poem is
that of optimism as the following lines reveal.
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too
Ode to Autumn reveals not Keatss pictorial quality only; but also a deep sense of
purpose underneath. Although the first impression may be that John Keats is
simply describing the main characteristics of autumn, and the human and animal
activities related to it, a deeper reading could suggest that Keats talks about the
process of life. Autumn symbolizes maturity in human and animal lives. Some
instances of this are the full-grown lambs, the sorrow of the gnats, the wind that
lives and dies, and the day that is dying and getting dark. As all we know, the next
season is winter, a part of the year that represents aging and death, in other words,
the end of life. However, in my opinion, death does not have a negative
connotation because Keats enjoys and accepts autumn or maturity as part of life,
though winter is coming. Joys must not be forgotten in times of trouble. Blakes
dictum, Under every grief and pine/Runs a joy with silken twine. The two are the
part of life. Thus thou has thy music too is the right approach to life showing the
process of maturity and optimism.
In short, what makes "To Autumn" beautiful is that it brings an engagement with
that connection out of the realm of mythology and fantasy and into the everyday
world. We are part of Autumn when it is personified and presented to us in the
figure of the winnower, sitting careless on a granary floor, the reaper on a half-
reaped furrow sound asleep, the gleaner keeping steady thy laden head across a
brook, and a spectator watching with patient look a cider-press and the last
oozings therefrom. The reaper, the winnower, the gleaner, and the cider-presser
symbolize Autumn. Through his process, the poet has learned that an acceptance of
mortality is not destructive to an appreciation of beauty and has gleaned wisdom
by accepting the passage of time that it is engagement; not escape is the purpose of
life.
John_Keats_Negative_Capability
According to Keats "Negative Capability" is an essential element of poetry.
Discuss.
Negative capability is a term that was first coined by Keats, and is used to refer to
the ability that humans have to transcend and think beyond the way that humans
are conditioned to think. It is a phrase that refers to the power of imagination in
relation to our ability as humans to think above and beyond our contexts. Keats
used it in one instance, where he was criticising Coleridge, who, in the opinion of
Keats, wrote his poetry in order to search for truth and as a result missed out on
beauty and its elevating affects.
Negative capability can be seen in many of the poems of Keats and is clearly
something that is vital to his poetry, as they all focus on nature or beauty and the
ways that they allow humans to transcend their limitations. Note, for example, the
following example from "Bright Star!":
No--yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft swell and fall,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest...
For the speaker, the power of the imagination allows him to look at the moon and
imagine possessing a combination of the moon's steadfastness and the human
ability to be intimate and close to capture the moment he is enjoying so deeply
forever. Negative capability is something therefore that lies at the very heart of the
poetry of Keats in the way that it allows humans to escape the restrictions of their
lives and imagine and experience different worlds.
What_is_Hellenism? #Discuss_Keats_as_a_Hellenist_with
#reference_to_Ode_To_Grecian_Urn?
Since Hellenism refers to the height of Greek culture, especially in regard to its
influence and colonization, Keats is a Hellenist in the sense that he continues to
spread Greek culture through his poetry.
Keats discusses the figures on the urn as pristine and perfect since they are frozen
in time. They do recall a civilization at its zenith, so this perfectly preserved image
- which is perfect because it is a frozen snapshot and cannot die (at least, the image
of the icons cannot die) - represents the Hellenistic culture at its finest. However,
Keats does come to the conclusion that the figures, perfect in their frozen image,
are silent and they do not consummate their love and therefore, cannot die but do
not live.
And in general, Keats is an aspiring Hellenist because he contemplates what it
would be like for those figures on the urn to be alive, or what it was like when they
were.