Salient Features Of Keats hp69

Salient features of Keats' poetry Romanticism primarily was a revolt against the artificial, pseudo-classical poetry in 18th Century. Wordsworth was the founder of this movement. Romantic poets can be divided into two groups – Old Romantics and Young Romantics. In old Romantics there are Wordsworth, Coleridge and Scott. Wordsworth, Coleridge and Scott belong to Early Romantics, whereas Keats, Shelley, and Byron constitute the Later Romantics. Among all the Romantics, Keats was the last to born and first to die. But quite surprisingly he achieved in 26 years what other could not get ever the whole of their life. Keats is also said to be the most romantic of all the romantics. He was greatly inspired by Greek art, culture and mythology. He was also inspired by Elizabethan poets especially Spenser. Keats is a pure romantic poet. He writes poetry for the sake of poetry. He believes in art for art’s sake. He does not write poetry for any palpable design or any propaganda. His major concern is to give pleasure. It means that his chief concern is pleasure. Whereas some other romantics have been writing poetry for the propagation of their objectives as Wordsworth and Shelley were in the favour of French Revolution. But Keats is least concern with the social issues of life. Love for nature is the chief characteristic of all he romantics. Keats also loves nature but he loves nature for the sake of nature. He does not give any theory or ideology about nature. He only ires the beauty of nature. But on the other hand, Wordsworth spiritualizes nature, Coleridge finds some supernatural elements in nature, Shelley intellectualizes nature and Byron is interested in the vigorous aspects of nature. Keats was a pure poet as he does not project any theory in his poetry. Keats believes in Negative Capability – the capability of being impersonal. Keats does not involve his personal feelings in his poetry. He writes poetry only for pleasure but Shelley lacks Negative Capability. Shelley lends his personal sorrow and feeling in his poetry. He could not be impersonal and writes about his feelings and sorrows. Keats is a sensuous poet. It means that he writes his poetry with his penta senses. We not only enjoy his poetry rather we can taste, touch, see and hear all the ideas presented in his poetry. We enjoy his poetry with all our penta sense. The whole of our body is involved in his poetry when we read him. Keats’ imagery is static and concrete whereas Shelley’s imagery is dynamic and abstract. Keats’ imagery shows the calmness of Keats’ mind whereas Shelley’s poetry shows his neurotic and confusing attitude. Keats was also Hellenistic like all romantics. He was inspired by Hellenism. Hellenism was the soul of his poetry. There are many Hellenistic features in his poetry such as his Greek instinct, his love for Greek literature, his love with Greek sculpture and art, his Greek temperament, his love for beauty and the touch of fatalism and tragedy. His attitude of melancholy is also Hellenistic.

“Ode on Indolence” as a weaker ode (Keats) “Ode on Indolence” is the weakest of all his poems because it lacks negative capability. There is no logical sequence in its stanzas. There is repetition of the ideas of Keats’ previous odes i.e. “Ode on Grecian Urn”, “Ode to Nightingale” and “Ode to Autumn”. Keats wrote this poem in his weakest moments of life. One of his brothers died, other left him. Besides, he was also suffering from inherited disease and on top of all his love Fanny Browne deserted him. He was disappointed in his ambition to be famous, disappointed in love and disappointed in his art of writing poetry and finally disappointed with life. He seems to be crying in helplessness. Instead of self-control, he depicted self-pity. The poet is in a mood of perfect indolence. Three figures happened to from his sight – Love, Ambition and Poesy. At the third time, the poet is tempted by them and longs for them but he thinks it his folly. At the fourth time, the three figures once again tempted him but now the reality has dawned upon him. Therefore, he bid them adieu. The poet is feeling asleep. He has lost all his faculties. Pain has ceased to be unpleasant and pleasure has ceased to be pleasant to him. He has become very indifferent to these feelings. Pain had no sting, and pleasure’s wreath no flower; The very sleepy moment of falling asleep has captured him. His mind is sleeping but not his senses. He is neither receptive nor productive. The only feelings he wants to have are no feelings. The poem is very much subjective and reflects the poet’s extreme hopelessness and disappointment. He reaches the climax of emotions and wants to withdraw from Love, Ambition and Poetry. O folly! What is love? and where it is? And for that poor Ambition! it springs From a man’s little heart’s short fever-fit; For Poesy! -- no -- she has not a joy. When he wants to withdraw from emotions, he wants to withdraw from the world. When he wants to withdraw from love, he wants to give up both lover and beloved. When he wants to withdraw from poetry, he wants to give up all imagination. Now he is contended with his “horrid indolence”. In rest of his odes, there is element of negative capability. In Keats’ own words “Poetry should be the outcome of the negative capability”. As in “Ode to Nightingale”, he negates himself and wants to fly with the nightingale.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee, Similarly in “Ode on Grecian Urn” he escapes into the world of art and says: Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; Whereas in “Ode on Indolence”, he is wailing for his personal emotions and unable to practice his own theory of negative capability. This poem has repetition of earlier poems. When one’s creative faculties fail, one starts repeating oneself. Same is true to Keats in this ode. He borrows ideas from earlier poems as his genius has been exhausted. Apart from this, the poem is not only weak with regard to content but also in the form. There is not logical sequence in the stanzas. The poem is divided into three distinct parts: narrative, descriptive and reflective. As in the first stanza, there is narrative quality. One morn before me were three figures seen, With bowed necks, and ed hands, side-faced; Then in the middle of the poem, there is descriptive quality. The first was a fair Maid, and Love her name; The second was Ambition, pale of cheek, ----------------------------------------------The last, whom o love more, the more of blame ----------------------------------------------I know to be my demon Poesy. The last part of the poem has a reflective quality: Vanish, ye Phantoms! from my idle spright, Into the clouds, and never more return! The word ‘never’ reflects the determination that these three ions – Love, Ambition and Poetry. Keats’ odes have been changed with that they do not have any logical end as in “Ode on Grecian Urn” and “Ode on Indolence”. But if we critically observe, to Keats the understanding through intellect is partial understanding. He rejects all palpable designs. He rejects all understanding and all logics and long for sensation. “O! for a life of sensation rather than of thought” On another occasion, he says: “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us.”

But this poem has aesthetic continuity from first to last. Above premises leads us to the conclusion that though poem has repetition earlier poems, it lacks negative capability and logical sequences of stanzas yet it has a definite of aesthetic feelings. So, the ode on the whole is not a weak ode. It has its aesthetic merits.

Keats' Sensuousness Keats is a mystic of the senses and not of thoughts as he sought to apprehend the ultimate truth of the universe through aesthetic sensations and not through philosophical thoughts. Sensuousness is a quality in poetry which affects the senses i.e. hearing, seeing, touching, smelling and tasting. Sensuous poetry does not present ideas and philosophical thoughts. It gives delight to senses, appeals to our eyes by presenting beautiful and coulourful word pictures to our ears by its metrical music and musical sounds, to our nose by arousing the sense of smell and so on. Keats is the worshiper of beauty and peruses beauty everywhere; and it is his senses that first reveal to him the beauty of things. He writes poetry only out of what he feels upon his pulses. Thus, it is his sense impressions that kindled his imagination which makes him realize the great principle that: ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ Keats loves nature for its own sake. He has a straightforward ion fro nature by giving his whole soul to the unalloyed enjoyment of its sensuous beauty. Poetry originates from sense impressions and all poets are more or less sensuous. Sense impressions are the starting point of poetic process. It is what the poet sees and hears that excites his emotions and imagination. The emotional and imaginative reaction to sense impressions generate poetry. The poets give the impressions receive by their eyes only. Wordsworth’s imagination is stirred by what he sees and hears in nature. Milton is no less sensitive to the beauty of nature, of the flowers in “Paradise Lost” in a sensuous manner. But Keats’ poetry appeals to our sense of sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch and sense of hot and cold. He exclaims in one of his letters: O for a life of sensation than of thoughts He is a pure poet in sense of seeking not sensual but sensuous delight. SENSE OF SIGHT: Keats is a painter of words. In a few words he presents a concrete and solid picture of sensuous beauty. “Her hair was long, her foot was light And her eyes were wild.” And in “Ode on Grecian Urn” again the sense of sight is active. “O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede Of marble men and maidens overwrought, With forest branches and the trodden weed;” SENSE OF HEARING: The music of nightingale produces pangs of pain in poet’s heart.

“The voice I hear this ing night was heard In ancient days, by emperor and clown:” In “Ode on Grecian Urn” he says: “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;” SENSE OF TOUCH: The opening lines of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” describe extreme cold: “The sedge is withered from the lake And no birds sing.” SENSE OF TASTE: In “Ode to Nightingale”, Keats describes different kinds of wine and the idea of their tastes in intoxication. “O for a beaker full of the warm South Full of the true the blushful Hippocrene,” SENSE OF SMELL: In “Ode to Nightingale”, the poet can’t see the flowers in darkness. There is mingled perfume of many flowers. “I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet.” Perhaps the best example of Keats sensuousness is “Ode to Autumn”. In this ode the season of autumn is described in sensuous in which all senses are called forth. “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness Close bosom friend of the maturing sun;” For Keats Autumn is the season of apples on mossed cottage tree, of fruits which are ripe to the core and of later flowers for bees. Thus autumn to Keats is full of pictures of delights of sense. There is the ripe fruit and ripe grains and also there is music that appeals to the ear. The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft. Keats is a poet of sensations. His thought is enclosed in sensuousness. In the epithets he uses are rich in sensuous quality – delicious face, melodious plot, sunburnt mirth, embalmed darkness and anguish moist. Not only are the sense perceptions of Keats are quick and alert but he has the rare gift of communicating these perceptions by concrete and sound imagery. As time es Keats mind matured and he expresses an intellectual and spiritual ion. He begins to see not only their beauty but also in their truth which makes Keats the “inheritor of unfulfill’d renown”. Keats is more poet of sensuousness than a poet of contemplation. Sometimes he es from sensuousness to sentiments. In his mature works like Odes or the Hyperion, the poet mixes

sensuousness with sentiments, voluptuousness with vitality, aestheticism with intellectualism. However the nucleus of Keats’ poetry is sensuousness. It is his senses which revealed him the beauty of things, the beauty of universe from the stars of the sky to the flowers of the wood. Keats’ pictorial senses are not vague or suggestive but made definite with a wealth of artistic detail. Every stanza, every line is replete with sensuous beauty. No other poet except Shakespeare could show such a mastery of language and felicity of sensuousness. Keats – Arts Versus Life Keats, unlike other romantics, creates art for the sake of art. Life is an enigma and art makes life understandable. Art is imaginative reconstruction of life. Both are complementary as in the world of the Urn. Engravings on the urn take him to the world of art and nightingale takes him into the world of fancy. In art, there is permanence and coldness of life. It is a deadly permanence. The pictures on the urn represent life but they lack life. In the world of reality, there is death, decay and transience but there is also warmth of life. Art provides a window between reality and imagination. It facilitates moments of reality and imagination. Keats discovered the metaphor of Grecian Urn. After seeing, he was motivated to speculate on the problems of life. He confronted the paradox of life and death, transience and permanence, actual and ideal, stillness and action, desire and fulfillment. After all the study, he reached the conclusion that: Beauty is truth, truth beauty  The title of Grecian Urn is paradoxical. It is a symbol of life and death, urn is a pot in which the ashes of the dead are kept. So it is a symbol of death. On the other hand, urn is preserved in centuries. It has become immortal. It has led a life more than life. Hence it is a symbol of life. So it resolves the paradox of life and death.  “Unravish’d bride” is a paradox of permanence and transience.  “Silence and slow time” is a paradox of time and timelessness.  Sylvan historian – art has narrative quality  Flowery tale – art has many stories about it and life.  What leaf-fring’d legend – Art tickles the mind.  What men or gods – art removes the distinction between mortal and immoral.  What mad pursuit – art creates ion, ecstasy and excitement.  Paradox between ideal and the real: Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter; In imagination there is no limit.  Paradox of desire and fulfillment: Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though wining near the goal – yet, do not grieve; Art captures the life.  There is no autumn engraved in the world of art. Ah! happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;  Art eternalizes the ions and beauty but in real life both decline. In the world of art, there is no deceit. For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair.  There is unending happiness in the world of art. More happy love! More happy, happy love.  Paradox of permanence and morality and unweariness. And, happy melodist unwearied,  There is newness and uniqueness in art For ever piping songs for ever new.  There is warmth and joy in art. For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d.  In art, there are no tensions and worries. A burning forehead, and parching tongue.  There is mystery in art O mysterious priest,  Paradox of the universal and the particular What little town by river or sea shore.

 Art has all signs of life except life. With forest branches and the trodden weed:  Art mimics life Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought.  Art is profound. When old age shall this Generation waste.  Art is prophetic. It gives the message Beauty is truth, truth beauty.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty Truth sometimes means reality, while reality is usually not beautiful at all. Reality can be disappointing or cruel or ugly. By choosing beauty to believe in as the total truth, we can sur the ugly part of reality the same way we sur the fear of death by believing in God. From here, we can even understand the poet's eagerness to make the living as happy as possible in stanza 3, by repeating 6 times "happy". He is rather decided to see beauty, which is connected with happiness and away from sorrow. He has made up his mind to choose beauty as his only truth at that time (or even earlier). It is why he uses the urn's tone to make his statement, as if the urn, a steady and still ancient thing, is saying that "why do not you believe in me? This is all you need to know on earth." If the "Ode to a Nightingale" portrays Keats's speaker's engagement with the fluid expressiveness of music, the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" portrays his attempt to engage with the static immobility of sculpture. The Grecian urn, ed down through countless centuries to the time of the speaker's viewing, exists outside of time in the human sense--it does not age, it does not die, and indeed it is alien to all such concepts. In the speaker's meditation, this creates an intriguing paradox for the human figures carved into the side of the urn: They are free from time, but they are simultaneously frozen in time. They do not have to confront aging and death (their love is "for ever young"), but neither can they have experience (the youth can never kiss the maiden; the figures in the procession can never return to their homes). The speaker attempts three times to engage with scenes carved into the urn; each time he asks different questions of it. In the first stanza, he examines the picture of the "mad pursuit" and wonders what actual story lies behind the picture: "What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?" Of course, the urn can never tell him the whos, whats, whens, and wheres of the stories it depicts, and the speaker is forced to abandon this line of questioning. In the second and third stanzas, he examines the picture of the piper playing to his lover beneath the trees. Here, the speaker tries to imagine what the experience of the figures on the urn must be like; he tries to identify with them. He is tempted by their escape from temporality and attracted to the eternal newness of the piper's unheard song and the eternally unchanging beauty of his lover. He thinks that their love is "far above" all transient human ion, which, in its sexual expression, inevitably leads to an abatement of intensity--when ion is satisfied, all that remains is a wearied physicality: a sorrowful heart, a "burning forehead," and a "parching tongue." His recollection of these conditions seems to remind the speaker that he is inescapably subject to them, and he abandons his attempt to identify with the figures on the urn. In the fourth stanza, the speaker attempts to think about the figures on the urn as though they were experiencing human time, imagining that their procession has an origin (the "little town") and a destination (the "green altar"). But all he can think is that the town will forever be deserted: If these people have left their origin, they will never return to it. In this sense he confronts head-on the limits of static art; if it is impossible to learn from the urn the whos and wheres of the "real story" in the first stanza, it is impossible ever to know the origin and the destination of the figures on the urn in the fourth. It is true that the speaker shows a certain kind of progress in his successive attempts to engage with the urn. His idle curiosity in the first attempt gives way to a more deeply felt

identification in the second, and in the third, the speaker leaves his own concerns behind and thinks of the processional purely on its own , thinking of the "little town" with a real and generous feeling. But each attempt ultimately ends in failure. The third attempt fails simply because there is nothing more to say--once the speaker confronts the silence and eternal emptiness of the little town, he has reached the limit of static art; on this subject, at least, there is nothing more the urn can tell him. In the final stanza, the speaker presents the conclusions drawn from his three attempts to engage with the urn. He is overwhelmed by its existence outside of temporal change, with its ability to "tease" him "out of thought / As doth eternity." If human life is a succession of "hungry generations," as the speaker suggests in "Nightingale," the urn is a separate and selfcontained world. It can be a "friend to man," as the speaker says, but it cannot be mortal; the kind of aesthetic connection the speaker experiences with the urn is ultimately insufficient to human life. The final two lines, in which the speaker imagines the urn speaking its message to mankind-"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," have proved among the most difficult to interpret in the Keats canon. After the urn utters the enigmatic phrase "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," no one can say for sure who "speaks" the conclusion, "that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." It could be the speaker addressing the urn, and it could be the urn addressing mankind. If it is the speaker addressing the urn, then it would seem to indicate his awareness of its limitations: The urn may not need to know anything beyond the equation of beauty and truth, but the complications of human life make it impossible for such a simple and self-contained phrase to express sufficiently anything about necessary human knowledge. If it is the urn addressing mankind, then the phrase has rather the weight of an important lesson, as though beyond all the complications of human life, all human beings need to know on earth is that beauty and truth are one and the same. It is largely a matter of personal interpretation which reading to accept.

Keats' concept of beauty Keats was considerably influenced by Spenser and was, like Spenser, a ionate lover of beauty in all its forms and manifestations. The ion of beauty constitutes his aestheticism. Beauty was his pole star, beauty in nature, in woman and in art. “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” He writes and identifies beauty with truth. Of all the contemporary poets Keats is one of the most inevitably associated with the love of beauty. He was the most ionate lover of the world as the career of beautiful images and of many imaginative associations of an object or word with a heightened emotional appeal. Poetry, according to Keats, should be the incarnation of beauty, not a medium for the expression of religious or social philosophy. He hated didacticism in poetry. “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us.” He believed that poetry should be unobtrusive. The poet, according to him, is a creator and an artist, not a teacher or a prophet. In a letter to his brother he wrote: “With a great poet, the sense of beauty overcomes every other consideration.” He even disapproved Shelley for subordinating the true end of poetry to the object of social reform. He dedicated his brief life to the expression of beauty as he said: “I have loved the principle of beauty in all things.” For Keats the world of beauty was an escape from the dreary and painful life or experience. He escaped from the political and social problems of the world into the realm of imagination. Unlike Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron and Shelley, he remained untouched by revolutionary theories for the regression of mankind. His later poems such as “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Hyperion” show an increasing interest in human problems and humanity and if he had lived he would have established a closer with reality. He may overall be termed as a poet of escape. With him poetry existed not as an instrument of social revolt nor of philosophical doctrine but for the expression of beauty. He aimed at expressing beauty for its own sake. Keats did not like only those things that are beautiful according to the recognized standards. He had deep insight to see beauty even in those things that are not thought beautiful by ordinary people. He looked at autumn and says that even autumn has beauty and charm: “Where are the song of Spring? Ay, where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, – While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue.” In Keats, we have a remarkable contrast both with Byron on the one side and with Shelley on the other. Keats was neither rebel nor utopian dreamer. Endowed with a purely artistic nature, he took up in regard to all the movements and conflicts of his time, a position of almost complete detacher. He knew nothing of Byron’s stormy spirit of hostility of the existing order of things and he had no sympathy with Shelley’s humanitarian and ion for reforming the

world. The famous opening line of “Endymion”, ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever’ strikes the keynote of his work. As the modern world seemed to him to be hard, cold and prosaic, he habitually sought an imaginative escape from it. He loved nature just for its own sake and for the glory and loveliness which he found in it, and no modern poet has ever been nearer than he was to the simple “poetry for earth” but there was nothing mystical in love and nature was never fraught for him, as for Wordsworth and Shelley, with spiritual message and meanings. Keats was not only the last but also the most perfect of the Romantics while Scott was merely telling stories, and Wordsworth reforming poetry or upholding the moral law, and Shelley advocating the impossible reforms and Byron voicing his own egoism and the political measure. Worshipping beauty like a devotee, perfectly content to write what was in his own heart or to reflect some splendour of the natural world as he saw or dreamed it to be, he had the noble idea that poetry exists for its own sake and suffers loss by being devoted to philosophy or politics. Disinterested love of beauty is one of the qualities that made Keats great and that distinguished him from his great contemporaries. He grasped the essential oneness of beauty and truth. His creed did not mean beauty of form alone. His ideal was the Greek ideal of beauty inward and outward, the perfect soul of verse and the perfect form. Precisely because he held this ideal, he was free from the wish to preach. Keats’ early sonnets are largely concerned with poets, pictures, sculptures or the rural solitude in which a poet might nurse his fancy. His great odes have for their subjects a storied Grecian Urn; a nightingale; the goddess Psyche, mistress of Cupid; the melancholy and indolence of a poet; and the season of autumn, to which he turns from the songs of spring. What he asked of poesy, of wine, or of nightingale’s song was to help him: “Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget, What thou amongst the leaves hast never known, The weariness, the fever and the fret, Here, where men sit and hear each other groan.” “I Stood Tiptoe Upon a Little Hill” and “Sleep and Poetry” – the theme of both these poems is that lovely things in nature suggest lovely tales to the poet, and great aim of poet is to be a friend to soothe the cares, and lift the thoughts of man. Perhaps Keats would have said that he attempted his nobler life of poetry in poems like “Lamia” and “Hyperion” but it is very doubtful whether he believed that he had done justice to this elevated type of poetic creation. Keats’ love of beauty is not ‘Platonic’ in nature. He loves physical objects and takes interest in human body. He does not become obscene but his love of beauty gives us very attractive and suggestive picture of women: “Yet still steadfast, still unchangeable, Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast, To feel forever its soft fall and swell, Awake forever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender taken breath, And so live ever.” Religion for him took definite shape in the adoration of the beautiful, an adoration which he

developed into a doctrine. Beauty is the supreme truth. It is imagination that discovers beauty. This idealism, assumes a note of mysticism. One can see a sustained allegory in “Endymion” and certain ages are most surely possessed of a symbolical value. Sidney Colvin says: “It was not Keats aim merely to create a paradise of art and beauty discovered from the cares and interests of the world. He did aim at the creation and revelation of beauty, but of beauty whatever its element existed. His concept of poetry covered the whole range of life and imagination.” As he did not live long enough, he was not able to fully illustrate the vast range of his conception of beauty. Fate did not give him time enough to fully unlock the ‘mysteries of the heart’ and to illuminate and put in proper perspective the great struggles and problems of human life.