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John Keats’ Love of Beauty
OR
John Keats’ As A Poet Of Escape
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John Keats’ Aestheticism
Of the qualities that made Keats great and that distinguished him from his great contemporaries, the first is the disinterested beauty, He grasped the essential oneness of beauty and truth. His creed did not mean the beauty of form alone. His ideal was the Greek ideal beauty inward and outward, the perfect soul of verse as well as perfect form. And precisely because he held this ideal, he was free from the wish to preach.
It was poetry itself that first enlisted his enthusiasm ---- poetry and art. His early sonnets are largely concerned with poets or with pictures, sculptures, or the rural solitudes in which a poet might arouse his fancy. His great odes have for their subjects a storied Green nightingale (light-winged Dryad of the trees, a singer throughout all ages made glamorous by poetry); the goddess Psyche, mistress of Cupid, in the season of autumn, to which he turns from the songs of spring for thou hast thy music too. 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 among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan.
This was the burden of his earlier poems in which he meditated upon his business as a poet: 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 the great aim of poetry is too.
be a friend
To soothe the cares, and lift the thoughts of man
He also gives her a hint of sterner themes
Where I may find the agonies, the strife
Of human hearts.
Perhaps Keats would have said that he attempted this nobler life of poetry in poems like Lamia and Hyperion, it is very doubtful whether he believed that he had one justice to the more elevated type of poetic creation.
Love for him was a bed of roses into which one sinks with a delicious sense of release from pain, responsibility, and moral inhibition. He did try, in his long fantasy of Endymion, to rise above the notion of love as the "mere commingling of passionate breath” and to depict love as 'a sort of oneness', “a fellowship with essence. But the delights of the senses, the free play of the fancy, and the relaxation of the tired nerves were still the most familiar marks with him.
But, according to Cazamina, the aestheticism of Keats has also an intellectual side. No one has ever reaped such rich harvest of thoughts out of the suggestions which life had to offer. Through reading and a thirst for knowledge, he became acquainted with Greece, paganism, and ancient art. He became saturated with Hellenism, having nothing of the learned scholar about him, but rather the naivete, the trifling errors of a self-taught genius. He read the writers of the Renascence, loved and cultivated Spenser, Champman, Fletcher and Milton. His letters show how closely the cult of Shakespeare was interwoven with his thinking. He admired Wordsworth most of all among contemporary writers, although the closest influence was that of Leigh Hunt, to whom he was indebted for something of his first manner.
From all these elements, continues Cazamina, Keats built for himself a personal store of reflections and ideas. 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, and scientific reasoning is an altogether inferior instrument of knowledge. This idealism assumes a note of mysticism one can see sustained allegory in. Endymion; and certain passages are most surely possessed of a symbolical value.
It was not Keats's aim, says Sidney Colvin, merely to create a paradise of art and beauty divorced from the cares and interests of the world. He did aim at the creation and revelation of beauty, but of beauty wherever its elements existed. His conception of poetry covered the whole range of life and imagination. It is true that, because he did not live long enough, he was not able to fully illustrate the vast range of his conception of poetry. During the brief period of his creative work, he could only reveal the hidden delights of Nature, understand and express the true spirit of classical antiquity, and recreate the spell of the Middle Ages. Fate did not give him time enough fully to unlock the mysteries of the heart and to illuminate and put in proper perspective the great struggles and problems of human life.