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John Keats’ Love of Beauty
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John Keats’ As A Poet Of Escape
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John Keats’ Aestheticism
John Keats was considerably influenced by Spenser and was, like the latter, a passionate lover of beauty in all its forms and manifestations. This passion for beauty constitutes his Aestheticism. Beauty, indeed, was his pole-star, beauty in Nature, in woman, and in art “A thing of beauty is a joy forever”, he writes and he identifies beauty with truth. “Of all the poets in his time Keats is one of the most inevitably associated with the love of beauty in the ordinary sense of the term. He was the most passionate lover of the world as the carrier of beautiful images and of the many imaginative associations of an object or word with whatever might give it 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.
John Keats hated didacticism in poetry. "We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us”, he wrote. 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, or rather obliterates all consideration”. He even disapproved of Shelley for subordinating the true end of poetry to the object of social reform. He dedicated his brief life to the expression of beauty. “I have loved the principle of beauty in all things”, he said.
The world of beauty was John Keats An escape from the dreary and painful effects of ordinary 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 absolutely untouched by revolutionary theories for the regeneration of mankind. His later poems such as the Ode To a Nightingale and Hyperion, no doubt show an increasing interest in humanity and human problems and, if he had lived, he would have established a closer contact with reality. As it is, he may on the whole 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." Critics accuse him of being indifferent they should realize that he aimed at expressing beauty for its own sake.
In John 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 purely artistic nature, he took up in regard to all the movements and conflicts of his time a position of almost complete detachment. He knows nothing of Byron's stormy spirit of antagonism to the existing order of things, and he had no sympathy with Shelley's humanitarian real and passion for reforming the world. The famous opening line of Endymion----- A thing of beauty is a joy forever'---- strikes the key note of his work. As the modern world seemed to him to be hard, cold, and prosaic, he habitually sought an imaginative escape from it, not like Shelley into the future land of promise, but into the past of Greek mythology, in Endymion, Lamia, and the fragmentary Hyperion, or of mediaeval romance, as in The Eve of St. Agnes, Isabella, and La Belle Dame Sans Merci. In his treatment of Nature, this same passion for sensuous beauty is still the dominant feature. He loved Nature just for its own sake and for the glory and loveliness which he everywhere found in it, and no modern poet has ever been nearer than he was to the simple poetry of earth'; but there was nothing mystical in the love and Nature was never fraught for him, as for Wordsworth and Shelley, with spiritual messages and meanings.
"John Keats was not only the last also the most perfect of the romanticists. While Scott was merely telling stories, and Wordsworth reforming poetry or upholding the moral law, and Shelley advocating impossible reforms and Byron voicing his own egoism and the political discontent of the times, Keats lived apart from men and form all political measures, worshiping 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, moreover, the novel idea that poetry exist for its own sake and suffers loss by being devoted to philosophy or politics, or, indeed to any cause, greater or small. ------(CONTINUE……)
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