KEATS STUDY GUIDE

This guide introduces you to some key concepts for understanding

Keatss poetry in general and Ode on a Grecian Urn in particular.

John Keats (along with Percy Shelley and Lord Byron) is referred to as a second
generation Romantic poet. (Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge make up the so-
called first generation.)
The second generation writers tend to be more skeptical and philosophically ironic.
They are more dubious, for example, about a Wordsworthian spirit that rolls
through all things. In Keatss case, this second-generation skepticism also applies
to the poets ego. Keats felt that Wordsworth was too self focused, too consumed
by the quest of the subjective self trying to wed with Nature and the spirit that
rolls through all things. For Keats, any epiphany or visionary spot of time could
only come about by way of what he called negative capability, which involves the
erasure of self to experience the potent otherness of the world.

Keats is not arguing that we should completely discount the self, and never have
personal convictions. Hes not saying that we should just let ourselves roam without
any direction. Hes not arguing that we should constantly change in fundamental
ways, such as one week we believe in God, then we become atheists, then
Buddhists, and so on. Instead, hes arguing that truth is no longer fixed or universal
or absolute. All we have is experience. And for Keats (and the Romantics in general)
we must continue to be open to experience. We cant do that if weve got all sorts
of fixed ideas.

That is what Keats means by negative capability. We do need philosophies, codes,

world viewswe have to have those things to survive. But we also have to be able
to suspend them, because they are filtering models. They can only tell us what we
put into them to begin with. They can therefore keep us, according to Keats, from
seeing something new.

Thats what Brownings dramatic monologues (like My Last Duchess) are all
about. To understand one of his characters we have to suspend our own egoswhat
we areand become that character. In the end, we become ourselves again, but
our ego, our sense of self, all that makes us a particular identity, changes from an
in-depth empathetic understanding of the other. So Keatss ideal of negative
capability has to do with suspending the ego, the subjective identity, and
becoming something else. Thats a process, and process is a watchword for the
Romantics.

For Keats, the truest way of life is one that is elastic and process-based. He is trying
to get away from system, because system will limit information and therefore limit
understanding. For Keats, we have to suspend whatever it is that makes us a self or
an ego. Thats why, for Keats, the poet is the most unpoetical of all things. He has
no self. He is always becoming another beinga nightingale, a Grecian urn. Eliot
was in many ways a Keatsian poet of negative capability. He eschewed the overly
personal or confessional in poetry. He suspended the self, the personalfiltering it
through figures like Prufrock.

This world, according to Keats, is not a vale of tears, a valley of suffering before the
final redemption through Christ or through nature or through some Wordsworthian
spirit that rolls through all things. Thats wrong, as far as Keats is concerned.
Rather, human existence is a vale of soul-making. Life cant redeem us. We can
redeem life. Nature doesnt have the answer. Nature becomes the occasion for
understanding that the answer lies within us.

The second generation poets are finding ways of letting go of God, which the first
generation werent ready to do. Take a look at J. Hillis Millers book The
Disappearance of Godthe disappearance begins here in the second-generation
Romantics. Wordsworth still has the hope that the landscape can be divine. When
we get to Victorians like Matthew Arnold and Alfred Lord Tennyson, we see that they
cant believe this any longer. For them, nature symbolizes the peace and beauty
possible in human existence, but it has no metaphysical implication or higher
significance. Arnold writes where nature ends, man begins. Byron, Keats and
Shelley fall in between the first generation Romantics (Blake, Wordsworth, and
Coleridge) and the major Victorians (Tennyson, Arnold, and Browning). These
second-generation Romantics cant believe in a genius loci, a spirit of the place.
For Keats, nature is beauty, a reminder of a classical world that once was, but
Nature is not divine, as it is for Wordsworth. Yet Keats has not yet reached the sort
of social or more existential vision that Arnold, Tennyson, and Browning exhibit.
A despair about the fleetingness of visionary experience and beauty is found in the
first-generation poets, but not with quite the same degree of skepticism or even
pessimism that we see in the second-generation poets. You can find evidence in
Wordsworths poetry of Romantic irony and doubt, but his works are not ultimately
skeptical. Its quite the contrary with Shelley and Keats and Byron. It is tough to
think of three poets more different than Byron, Shelley, and Keats in terms of their
basic temperaments. They are linked by the Zeitgeist, by skepticism, and therefore
by the notion that process and aspiration are of central importance, rather than
some central truth that can be pronounced. But in terms of their individual
temperaments and personalities, the three are extremely different.

One way to find ones humanity and to fulfill desire is to surrender to passion, to
some kind of Blakean daemonic energy, to the ecstatic sublime. Thats what Keatss
poetry is often about. Keats once wrote: Oh for a life of sensations, rather than
thought. Then there is also Keats the aesthete, a tutelary genius for the pre-
Raphaelite poets. Those who founded the art for arts sake movementthe
Rossettis, Pater, Swinburnelooked to Keats as their model. Negation of the self is
only the first step for Keats, however: you negate those things that make you an
ego. But the crucial next step is that then you become aware that these sorts of
experiences are mysteries and uncertainties. For Keats, if we deal with life
experiences and the objects and beings of the world using fact and reason, then we
distort them. Keats once said that he got inside a billiard ball to such an extent that
he could actually feel its roundness. For Keats its all about sensual and ecstatic
identification.

In My Last Duchess, the easy thing to do is make a moral judgment: the speaker
is evil because he had his wife killed. But if its that simple, then why write the
poem, and why read it? Whats interesting is to enter into the Dukes mind. Our
doing this doesnt make him not evil, but it allows us to considerwell, is he
insane? Or is he someone who views his wife as a piece of art? There is a danger of
course. Once you start to historicize a situation, once you start to psychologize a
human being, it does run the risk of moral relativism (where any immoral behavior
is excusable because the evil is linked to understandable underlying causes). It
doesnt have to come to moral relativism, but the threat is clearly there. So we
have to beware of pure relativism, because we may dupe ourselves into
perpetrating or maintaining or legitimating or excusing brutal oppressions and
exercises of violence.

For Keats, we have to have agilitywe have to be able to see it both ways. One
could argue that people who dont do so because of the fear of perplexity and
paradox. But theres also the possibility that they dont embrace ambiguity because
they are so (problematically) confident about who and what they are.

Clearly, we have to have models to function and live. But models can only tell us
what we program them to tell us. Keatss point is that there is no model that can be
programmed in an imaginative way that will allow us to understand the kinds of
questions he wants to explore. So we have to suspend those models, so that we can
be completely open to experience in all of its intensity, richness, complexity, and
ambiguity. When its over, weve got to put the model back on and act. But thats at
the end. What hes often left with is not the answer but the question.

In his letters on negative capability, Keats claims something similar to Eliots point
in Tradition and the Individual Talent. Eliot is arguing against personality, and
saying that the personality of the poet is certainly involved but its involved
primarily as a catalyst. If you look at the residue of the chemical interaction that
takes place, its the poem; you dont find any trace of the poets personality there
because hes found an objective correlativean image or scene or figure that
stands in and correlates to the poets personality or feelings or ideas. The poets
real, everyday personality never gets represented directly. Keatss point seems to
be very similar here because he goes on to say that writers of genius dont have
any individuality. Even in early letters Keats is thinking about personality,
individuality and the way in which that is very different from the quality of mind
that goes to make up a genius imagination.

Whats hes trying to do is become one with the thing he contemplates, to

imaginatively enter into its life, rather than to think about what he thinks about it.
So thats the first part of negative capability: negating ones own ego, personality,
identity, in order to see things from the perspective of the other person or thing or
situation. According to Keats, geniuses dont use their strong identity in a moment
of creation; theyre more like the chameleon.
Everything in Wordsworth, everything, is filtered through his personality, his needs,
his memories, his feelings. Keats has a different vision of the poets character or
self: it is not itself, it has no self, it is everything and nothing. It has no character.

Wordsworth, in Keatss mind, is also the virtuous philosopher poet. Keatss ideal is
the chameleon poet, becoming what we imagine, taking on the character of
someone else or some situation. Keats admires a philosophical disinterestedness.
Thats really what hes talking aboutdisinterestedness, open-ended speculation
without a priori moral judgments or explanatory models. Again, he writes, A poet is
the most unpoetical of anything in existence.

In his letters about the chameleon poet, Keats begins to develop his idea of
negative capability. But hes still only at the beginningnegating his own
personality, with the exception of his advocacy of speculation. But then the
negative capability letter itself (To George and Tom Keats, Dec. 21-27, 1817) he
says that it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially
in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormouslyI mean Negative
Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts,
without any irritable reaching after fact & reason . . . Coleridge, for instance [was]
incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge.

So here is the proper model for Keatsnot Wordsworth or Coleridge, but

Shakespeare. Keats is taking Shakespeare as his great ideal. Ultimately, Keats
begins to want to combine what he values of the poetry of the pastHomer, Virgil,
Shakespeare, which is poetry that has great power and scopewith what he
admires in his contemporary poets, their inwardness and psychological
explorations. Eventually, too, he starts to rethink Wordsworth, and he tries to
decide who was the greater poet, Wordsworth or Milton.

In looking at Keatss famous Odes, try to think about imaginative ascent and
descent. The scholar Jack Stillinger claims that the Keatsian speaker always begins
in the world of actuality, takes off on a flight of imagination, but theneither
because theres something lacking in the object hes meditating on, or because
theres some problem in maintaining the meditationthe flight returns to earth and
again with questions.
Walter Jackson Bate maintains that what these poems dramatize is the greeting of
the spirit with its object. Many readers see Romanticism being about an attempt to
overcome the split between subject and object through meditation.

Another critic uses the phrase lyrics of symbolic debate. Think about the
Romantic poets and what is most distinctive about them. Wordsworth is interested
in nature as it is colored by memory. With Keats, its the skeptical perspective that
critics characterize with the words debate and drama. Thats perhaps most
central.

The other thing that is truer of Keats than the others is the sense in which he uses a
particular symbol to organize the poem. In Wordsworth, there are passages in
poems that focus on a symbol, but its the concreteness of an object that often
makes a poem distinctively Keatsian.

Keatss approach to a symbol in a poem reveals his desire to see if that symbol is
commensurate with the imagination in its stepping towards a truth (thats Keatss
phrase). Using negative capability, Keats causes the object to become an objective
correlativea correlate to a specific emotional or psychological state. Keats is
different from Wordsworth, who is more subjective and personality driven. Keats is
trying to find an objective correlative, and so he negates his own personality
(whatever it is in his personally thats driving himwhether its tuberculosis, the
death of his brother, his own worries, and so on). He tries to negate that and
sympathetically approach the symbol, the object. He tries to capture something in
all of its concreteness, particularity, ambiguity, and he uses the symbol as a field in
which opposing attitudes can engage.

What Keats affirms at the end is the spirit, the symbol, the process. He doesnt
want to dissolve the mysteries, the uncertainties that are crucial to that experience,
process, and symbol. He is always being skeptical, open-ended, contemplating the
variety of ways of looking at an object. In the Ode on a Grecian Urn the entire
poem focuses on the urn. Its almost as if Keats is holding an urn in his hands and
turning it; its there from beginning to end. There is a drama between perception
and object, but thats the controlling form of the whole poem. In the case of the
urn, he starts with the work of art itself, and his question is: Can art provide some
system of salvation? Hes never sure.
To help yourself understand the concreteness and aestheticism of Keats, think
about the way in which Keats becomes an important figure later in the nineteenth
century, especially for the pre-Raphaelites, who believed in art for arts sake. We
havent read anything by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, or his sister Christina Rossetti, or
Charles Algernon Swinburne, but these poets are interested in the beautiful object.
Were talking about the height of the Industrial Revolution and materialistic society;
these artists wanted to protect the beauty of art from that kind of crass world.
When they looked for inspiration, Keats was one of their major figures. They were
interested in beauty, in art as a religion. Here is the sense of art as ritual, of art as
something that kept alive certain human sensibilities and emotions.

The pre-Raphaelites were also interested in the Keats of dreamy escapism. In one
letter, Keats says, what the imagination seizes as beauty must be true. This is
something scholars point to as they try to make sense of Keatss evolving concept
of the imagination. This is definitely something else that the pre-Raphaelites would
have found very congenial. Later, Keats says, Oh, for a life of sensation rather than
thoughts. This can be viewed as Keats celebrating a kind of empiricism. But also,
as in Ode to a Nightingale, theres a more philosophical interpretation possible. In
the famous negative capability letter, he says the excellence of every art is its
intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate . . . being in close
relationship with beauty and truth. So there is always this emphasis on intensity,
on concrete, sensual pleasure in Keats.

Romanticism was for many years defined as the age of feeling as opposed to the
age of reason. For Keats, that is the way to truth and beauty, through the intensity
of response to an object. Always remember Keats the esthete, Keats the poet who
pursues the ideal by positing a separation between the world of mutability and the
world of visionary imagination.

Keats wants the power, the scope and scale of the great classical writers like Homer
and Virgil, but he admires the inward, searching nature of his contemporaries. So
he starts to rethink Wordsworth. Wordsworth has been set up as the model of the
poet of egotistical sublime, as opposed to the Keatsian chameleon poet. So we have
to keep in mind Keatss re-evaluation of Wordsworth. In a way, his re-evaluation
embodies his own negative capability; he ends up looking at Wordsworth and
holding competing and even contradictory notions in his mind at the same time. His
earlier views about Wordsworth tend to be negative, his later views positive.

In a letter written in 1818, Keats uses the word schweben, hovering, between
luxuriance and a love of philosophy, between an exquisite sense of luxuriant
amassing of sensuous pleasure, and philosophical speculation. Here is Keats
beginning to think about truth not necessarily as something equivalent to beauty,
but as having something to do with knowledge and philosophy.

For Keats, the whole purpose of life is that its an opportunity to create a soul or an
identity. Morse Peckham argues that the Christian view is that life redeems us
were given grace. The thrust of Keatss vale of soul-making is almost the reverse:
that we can redeem life, give it value and meaning if we see it not as a vale of
tears, but as a vale of soul-making. For Keats this is something far more active and
creative than a kind of stoical acceptance of suffering, waiting for atonement, and
so forth.

So negative capability and the vale of soul-making are not antithetical notions:
negative capability refers to the act of poetic composition; for a poet to create as
richly and freely as he or she desires, it is necessary to get beyond the limits of ego
and personality to see a thing from multiple points of view. With his vale of soul-
making idea, Keats is not talking about writing poetry, but about every human
being. Its somewhat similar to the Lockean idea of the tabula rasa. But its also
similar to the more organic view of human life and the cosmos that find in Romantic
art. Its similar to Wordsworths growth the poets mind. This is Keatss idea of the
growth of the human mind. So hes throwing off the Christian system of salvation in
favor of a more existentialist one.

Rarely, but often enough to make a profound impact, there may come in an
imaginative life Wordsworthian spots of time, or visionary experiences. This may
come for Keats through meditating on the nightingales song, or from turning the
Grecian urn in his mind. Keats begins with the moment of experience, that triggers
thought, feeling, memory, intuition, and those working somehow together
constitute the imagination.
Keatss letters are remarkable. They capture someone debating with himself. What
does it mean to be a poet, writing at this particular time in the history of the world?
He talks about the advance of the age. He has something of a sense of an aesthetic
revolution. Hes grappling, debating with all sorts of notions about where hes going
to go as a poet. And he is shadowed by thoughts of mortality, a sense of knowing
that he is going to die (Keats died at an early age from tuberculosis).

In Keats, there is still the possibility of a world in which imagination, feeling and
love can bring renewal. And that is what Romantic art in one sense is all about.
ODE ON A GRECIAN URN

I.
Thou still unravishd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringd legend haunts about thy shape
Of dieties or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

II.
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but more endeard,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goalyet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

III.
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoyd,
Forever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyd,
A burning forehead, and a parched tongue.

IV.
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Leadst thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with Garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can eer return.

V.
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayst,
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,that is all ye know
On earth, and all ye need to know.
From Romantic Irony by Anne Mellor:

In Ode on a Grecian Urn, Keats again poses the romantic delights of an

idyllic world, now identified with the deathless realm of art, against the skeptical
consciousness of human pain and mortality. Here the debate focuses on the value
of art itself rather than on the possibility of unselfconsciousness or lack of irony.
Because the urn is static and visible, the poet can greet it directly, fully enter its
life, and explore all its dimensions exhaustively. But even as the poet approaches
the urn, he is aware of its limitations: it is beautiful, but unravishda bride who
has not known the ecstasy of sexual consummation. And while the proverb has it
that Truth is the daughter of time, this urn is but a foster-child of time, not a
direct descendant from truth. The urn is only a sylvan historian, a teller of
pastoral tales whose knowledge is thus provincial and incomplete. Nonetheless, the
urns beauty is compelling to the poets empathic capacities; and he eagerly enters
into the world depicted on its shape. Asking increasingly urgent questions that
record his intensifying involvement in the life of these men or gods (who only in
the eternal realm of art are indistinguishable), the poet comes to fully apprehend
and appreciate the sweeter melodies of the pure imagination, uncorrupted by the
limitations of human musicians, and the never-ceasing pleasure and beauty of a
passionate love Forever warm and still to be enjoyd, For ever panting, and for
ever young. But even as he enthusiastically delights in the perfection of ever-
green boughs, ever-new songs, and ever-intense erotic love, he is ironically aware
of the distance between such perfect happiness (which is all the more perfect for
being anticipated rather than disappointingly realized) and a mortal world where
leaves are shed, melodists grow weary, and breathing human passion leaves a
heart high-sorrowful and cloyd.
Having perplexed his enthusiastic delight in the urns enduring beauty with
his ironic appreciation of a human love that is both consummated and destroyed,
the poet turns back to the urn with questions predicated, no longer on the
assumption that the figures depicted on the urn are gods, but on the assumption of
a shared finite humanity. Who are these people? What little town did they come
from? And now that he sees the urns figures as human beings rather than as
perfect, immortal deities, the poet can see them only as dead, lost in history. Little
town, thy streets for evermore / Will silent be; and not a soul to tell / Why thou art
desolate, can eer return.
And now the urn seems to the poet no longer a living world populated by
intensely happy trees, lovers, and musicians but simply an object, an Attic shape
whose fair attitude is as posed and artificial as Lady Emma Hamiltons legendary
Attitudes. As Schlegel said, The play of communicating and approaching is the
business and the force of life; absolute perfection exists only in death (DP, 54).
And yet this Cold Pastoral has the capacity, even if only for a single moment, to
tease us out of thought, to do us the service of ultimate good friendship and
release us, however briefly, from our ironic consciousness of mortal limits. And
because the urn, the masterful work of art, has this power to lift man out of self-
consciousness, to make him conscious instead of how it feels to live in a world of
perfect beauty, perpetual spring, always passionate love, it has earned the right to
display its aphoristic, leaf-fringd legend or inscription. Responding to the poets
questions, the urn at last enters the debate and speaks: Beauty is Truth,Truth
Beauty,that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. In the realm of art,
beauty and truth can fully unite; there, what the imagination seizes as beauty
must be truth, for only what is beautiful has absolute aesthetic validity. And from
the point of view of the work of art, aesthetic criteria are all that exist: That is all /
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. Since these aesthetic values can bring
intense and undeniable pleasure to men and womenthe vicarious experience of
eternal delightthey are indeed friends who must be cherished. But the poem
has posed these aesthetic or romantic values of beauty and stasis against another
set of values, the ironic truth of a human existence consummated in time. In this
realm where death incites the agonies and strife of human hearts, neither love nor
beauty lasts; beauty can be only skin-deep; and the truth can be ugly. In this
poems delicate balancing of two opposed realities, the urns final statement both is
and is not true.
 An Overview
John Keats lived only twenty-five years
and four months (1795-1821), yet his
poetic achievement is extraordinary. His
writing career lasted a little more than five
years (1814-1820), and three of his great
odes--"Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a
Grecian Urn," and "Ode on Melancholy"--
were written in one month. Most of his
major poems were written between his
twenty-third and twenty-fourth years, and
all his poems were written by his twenty-
fifth year. In this brief period, he produced poems that rank
him as one of the great English poets. He also wrote letters
which T.S. Eliot calls "the most notable and the most
important ever written by any English poet."

His genius was not generally perceived during his lifetime

or immediately after his death. Keats, dying, expected his
poetry to be forgotten, as the epitaph he wrote for his
tombstone indicates: "Here lies one whose name was writ in
water." But nineteenth century critics and readers did come to
appreciate him, though, for the most part, they had only a
partial understanding of his work. They saw Keats as a sensual
poet; they focused on his vivid, concrete imagery; on his
portrayal of the physical and the passionate; and on his
immersion in the here and now. One nineteenth century critic
went so far as to assert not merely that Keats had "a mind
constitutionally inapt for abstract thinking," but that he "had
no mind." Keats's much-quoted outcry, "O for a life of
Sensation rather than of Thoughts!" (letter, November 22,
1817) has been cited to support this view.

With the twentieth century, the perception of Keats's

poetry expanded; he was and is praised for his seriousness
and thoughfulness, for his dealing with difficult human
conflicts and artistic issues, and for his impassioned mental
pursuit of truth. Keats advocated living "the ripest, fullest
experience that one is capable of"; he believed that what
determines truth is experience ("axioms are not axioms until
they are proved upon our pulses"). The publication of Keats's
letters, with their keen intellectional questioning and concern
with moral and artistic problems, contributed to this re-
assessment. His letters throw light on his own poetic practices
and provide insight into writing in general. Click here
for excerpts from Keats's letters.

Keats and Romanticism

Keats belonged to a literary movement
called romanticism. Romantic poets, because of their theories
of literature and life, were drawn to lyric poetry; they even
developed a new form of ode, often called the romantic
meditative ode.

The literary critic Jack Stillinger describes the typical

movement of the romantic ode: The poet, unhappy with the
real world, escapes or attempts to escape into the ideal.
Disappointed in his mental flight, he returns to the real world.
Usually he returns because human beings cannot live in the
ideal or because he has not found what he was seeking. But
the experience changes his understanding of his situation, of
the world, etc.; his views/feelings at the end of the poem
differ significantly from those he held at the beginning of the
poem.

Themes in Keats's Major Poems

Douglas Bush noted that "Keats's important poems are
related to, or grow directly out of...inner conflicts." For
example, pain and pleasure are intertwined in "Ode to a
Nightingale" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn"; love is intertwined
with pain, and pleasure is intertwined with death in "La Belle
Dame Sans Merci," "The Eve of St. Agnes," and "Isabella; or,
the Pot of Basil."

Cleanth Brooks defines the paradox that is the theme of

"Ode to a Nightingale" somewhat differently: "the world of
imagination offers a release from the painful world of
actuality, yet at the same time it renders the world of
actuality more painful by contrast."

Other conflicts appear in Keats's poetry:

transient sensation or passion / enduring art

dream or vision / reality
joy / melancholy
the ideal / the real
mortal / immortal
life / death
separation / connection
being immersed in passion / desiring to escape
passion

Keats often associated love and pain both in his life and in
his poetry. He wrote of a young woman he found attactive,
"When she comes into a room she makes an impression the
same as the Beauty of a Leopardess.... I should like her to ruin
me..." Love and death are intertwined in "Isabella; or, the Pot
of Basil," "Bright Star," "The Eve of St. Agnes," and "La Belle
Dame sans Merci." The Fatal Woman (the woman whom it is
destructive to love, like Salome, Lilith, and Cleopatra) appears
in "La Belle Dame sans Merci" and "Lamia."

Identity is an issue in his view of the poet and for the

dreamers in his odes (e.g., "Ode to a Nightingale") and
narrative poems. Of the poetic character, he says, "... it is not
itself--it has no self--it is every thing and nothing--it has no
character--it enjoys light and shade--it lives in gusto, be it foul
or fair, high or low, right or poor, mean or elevated..." He calls
the poet "chameleon."

Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling summarize Keats's world

view succinctly:

Beyond the uncompromising sense that we

are completely physical in a physical world,
and the allied realization that we are
compelled to imagine more than we can
know or understand, there is a third quality
in Keats more clearly present than in any
other poet since Shakespeare. This is the
gift of tragic acceptance, which persuades
us that Keats was the least solipsistic of
poets, the one most able to grasp the
individuality and reality of selves totally
distinct from his own, and of an outward
world that would survive his perception of
it.

They believe that Keats came to accept this world, the here
and now, as the ultimate value.

Keats's Odes
All written in May 1819, "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a
Grecian Urn," and "Ode on Melancholy" grew out of

a persistent kind of experience which

dominated Keats's feelings, attitudes, and
thoughts during that time. Each of them is
a unique experience, but each of them is
also, as it were, a facet of a larger
experience. This larger experience is an
intense awareness of both the joy and pain,
the happiness and the sorrow, of human
life. This awareness is feeling and becomes
also thought, a kind of brooding as the poet
sees them in others and feels them in
himself. This awareness is not only feeling;
it becomes also thought, a kind of brooding
contemplation of the lot of human beings,
who must satisfy their desire for happiness
in a world where joy and pain are inevitably
and inextricably tied together. This union of
joy and pain is the fundamental fact of
human experience that Keats has observed
and accepted as true.
 Wright Thomas and Stuart Gerry Brown

In "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode on a Grecian

Urn," Keats tries to free himself from the world of change by
identifying with the nightingale, representing nature, or the
urn, representing art. These odes, as well as "The Ode to
Psyche" and the "Ode to Melancholy," present the poet as
dreamer; the question in these odes, as well as in "La Belle
Dame Sans Merci" and "The Eve of St. Agnes," is how Keats
characterizes the dream or vision. Is it a positive experience
which enriches the dreamer? or is it a negative experience
which has the potential to cut off the dreamer from the real
world and destroy him? What happens to the dreamers who
do not awaken from the dream or do not awaken soon
enough?

Keats's Imagery
Keats's imagery ranges among all our physical sensations:
sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell, temperature, weight,
pressure, hunger, thirst, sexuality, and movement. Keats
repeatedly combines different senses in one image, that is, he
attributes the trait(s) of one sense to another, a practice
calledsynaesthesia. His synaesthetic imagery performs two
major functions in his poems: it is part of their sensual effect,
and the combining of senses normally experienced as
separate suggests an underlying unity of dissimilar
happenings, the oneness of all forms of life. Richard H. Fogle
calls these images the product of his "unrivaled ability to
absorb, sympathize with, and humanize natural objects."

Examples of Synaesthetic Images

"Ode to a Nightingale"

In some MELODIOUS plot / Of BEECHEN GREEN (stanza I)

Combines sound ("melodious") and sight

("beechen green")

TASTING of Flora and the country green,

Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker of the warm South, (stanza II)

Here the poet TASTES the visual ("Flora and

the country green"), activity ("Dance"), sound
("Provencal song"), and mood or pleasure
("mirth"); also the visual ("sunburnt") is
combined with a pleasurable emotional state
("mirth"). With the beaker there is finally
something to taste, but what is being tasted is
temperature ("warm") and a location ("South").

But here here is no LIGHT,

 Save what from heaven is with the BREEZES
BLOWN (stanza IV)

Combines sight ("light") with touch/movement

("breezes blown"). This image describes light
filtering through leaves moved by the wind.

Nor what SOFT INCENSE HANGS upon the

boughs (stanza V)

Combines touch ("soft"), weight ("hangs"), and

smell ("incense).

"Eve of St. Agnes"

The SILVER, SNARLING trumpets 'gan to chide

Combines vision ("silver," the color of the

trumpets) and sound (trumpets produce a
"silver" sound).

"Isabella; or, The Pot of Gold"

And TASTE the MUSIC of that VISION pale. (stanza XLIX)

Now it's your turn. What three sensory

experiences are combined in this line?