Revolt against Neoclassical Poetry:
In his revolt against the artificial poetic diction of the Augustan age, Keats was in the line of the other Romantic poets. His disapproval of the neoclassical poetry is found in his sleep and Poetry. He correctly thought that neo - classical poetry was fostered by “foppery and barbarism”. He did not hold neo - classical poets like Pope high in his esteem. He discarded Pope and the neo - classicists as they were “closely wed to musty law lined out with wretched rule and compass vire”. His criticism of the neoclassical poetry was based on valid grounds. He was of the opinion that “The school of dolts” had reduced poetry to mere “handicraftsmanship”.
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| Prominent Traits of John Keats’ Poetry |
He was one of the greatest poet of the Romantic Revival in whose poetry are found all the chief characteristics of the Romantic poetry such as love of nature, intensity of emotions, spontaneity of expression, unfettered flight of imagination, sense of wonder, fresh and living poetic diction, creative vision and the like as opposed to urbanity, methodized nature and so on. Keats believed that “poetry should come naturally like leaves to a tree”. He did not consider it an intellectual exercise or verbal jugglery. To him, it was the expression of a genuinely - felt thought.
An Apostle of Beauty:
Keats is known as a poet of beauty. He was a Greek on account of his passion the beauty. It is no exaggeration to say that he is one of the greatest apostles of beauty that the world has produced. He declared that I have loved the principle of beauty in all things. In fact beauty was his cardinal principal and the creation of beauty was his supreme endeavour. It was his belief that with a great poet the sense of beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all other considerations. He is the author of the famous line “A thing of beauty is a joy forever”. He identified beauty with truth and affirmed that “What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth”. For him, to see things in their beauty is to know the whole truth about them.
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty that is all,
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
But it should be borne in mind that Keats's conception of beauty is very comprehensive. He does not speak of the beauty of form alone; it includes the beauty of the soul of things. It was his conviction that the principle of beauty governs all objects and having formed this opinion, he was sure to realize that beauty is not exclusively material or sensuous, not exclusively intellectual or spiritual, but finds its expression in the fullest development of all that goes to make up human perfection. His ideal of beauty was the harmony between external and internal aspects of an object. In his poetry is found an uneasing quest for beauty wherever it may be found. The flight of his imagination is very high and extensive. It takes him to the world of classical beauty, to the medieval world of romance and mystery, to the Elizabethan world of vigour and passion, to the world of sickness and sorrow. He asserts that beauty is synonyms with strength. He puts
“It is the eternal law
That first in beauty should be first in might.”
Another aspect of Keats's conception of beauty is that though it is eternal and undying, it is also transient. In Ode to a Nightingale he speaks of the world
“Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond tomorrow.”
A Poet of Nature:
Keats is one the poets of Nature par excellence. His treatment of nature is different from other romantic poet of his age like Wordsworth and Shelley. “He had grown up neither like Wordsworth under the spell of lake and mountain, nor in the glow of millennial dreams like Shelley, looked at Nature from the moral and spiritual point of view.” His attitude towards Nature is essentially didactic. But Keats emphatically repudiated the didactism of Wordsworth, who said, “Every great poet is a teacher; I wish to be considered as a teacher or as nothing.” Keats does not like to assume the role of a moral teacher. He hated poetry that has a palpable design upon us . Poetry must be unobtrusive, a thing of beauty which is a joy for ever. Keats's attitude towards Nature is also different from that of Shelley who intellectualized Nature and his approach is of a dreamer and visionary. His Nature reflects human passion and moods.
Keats, contrary to his contemporary, does not associate any theory with Nature. He loved and portrayed Nature for its own sake. Different aspects of Nature, its beauty and bounty fill his heart with immense joy. He feels as much pleasure in perceiving the beauty of Nature as a lover feels in gazing on the face of his sweet heart. There is no mysticism or turmoil in his Nature. He does not look at Nature with a view to bring social, moral or spiritual changes. Downer points out that Keats “Seeks to know Nature perfectly and to enjoy her fully, with no ulterior end or other thought than to give her complete expression. With him, no consideration of natural theology, humanity or metaphysics mingle with Nature.” His only aim is to derive sensuous pleasure from various objects of Nature. As Sidney Colvin says, “The spirit which animates the poetry of Keats is essentially the spirit of delight, delight in the beauty of nature and the vividness of sensation, delight in the charm of fable, in the thoughts of exercise of the art itself which expresses and communicates all these joys.”
In his depiction of Nature, Keats never gives up realism. Indeed, realism is the salient feature of his portrayal of Nature. A. R. Weekes points out that “Keats neither gives a moral life to Nature, nor attempts to pass beyond her familiar manifestations. His aim, perhaps the highest of all, is to see and to render Nature as she is.” But in his delineation of Nature, Keats does not conceal its ugly aspects. He points out pleasant as well as unpleasant aspects of Nature. In The Eve of St. Agnes, he has described the “bitter chill”, the owl that is “a – cold”, the numb “Beadsman's fingers”. In To Autumn, along with “mellow fruitfulness”, there is also the depiction of the “stubble – plains”.
A Sensuous and Pictorial Poet:
Keats is a sensuous poet. As Matthew Arnold remarks, “No one can question the eminency in Keats's poetry of the quality of sensuousness. Keats as a poet is abundantly and enchantingly sensuous.” Keats cried, “O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts.” In another letter he remarks with a great poet the sense of Beauty obliterates every other consideration. In fact his constant endeavour has been to create beauty that appeals primarily to the senses. As Brandes says, “It is impossible for Keats to name any conception or any thought without at once proceeding to represent it in a corporeal plastic form.”
With Keats, it usually happened that he lost himself in sensations; he tended to luxuriate in beauty to fill his poetry with sweetness. It is because of this tendency that there is a little too much of gorgeous sweetness in his poetry. As Robert Bridges remarks, Keats is apt “to class women with roses and sweet meats”. Keats has a special liking for pleasant sensations. In the Ode to a Nightingale, he yearns for rich, inspiring purple stained wine, fragrant flowers, enchanting melody of the nightingale, musk rose full of dewy wine and so on. In the Ode on a Grecian Urn, we have the description of flowery trees, sweet melodies and beautiful women trying to escape the hot pursuit of their lovers. In The Eve of St. Agnes, there is a palpable picture of the unrobing of the young maiden.
In fact Keats is a great pictorial artist. With his pen, he takes the work of the brush of a painter. His pen pictures are more vivid and interesting than the pictures drawn with the help of a brush. There is a plethora of tangible images - visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile and gustative. The visual imagery in his poetry is most conspicuous, vivid and palpable. He feels delight in painting a picture that is essentially sensuous:
“Light feet, dark violet eyes, and parted hair,
Soft dimpled hands, white neck and creamy breast.”
It is his long cherished desire to be, “pillowed upon his fairs ripening breast”. He portrays a typical sensuous picture in his Endymion:
“Enchantress! tell me by this soft embrace,
By the most soft completion of thy face,
Those lips, O slippery blisses, twinkling eyes’
And by these tenderest, milky sovereignties.”
However, a striking quality of Keats's sensuousness is that it does not exclude the spiritual. In fact, the sensuals and the spiritual are different in mode only and not in kind. They merge into each other.
“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
No to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.”
In Hyperion Keats has become inward and spiritual, but in doing so, he does not cease to be the sensuous. Lowel justly observes that “the sensational was elevated into the typical by the control of that finer sense which underlines the senses and is the spirit of them.”
A Lyric Poet:
Keats is essentially a great lyrical poet. His poetry excels in music. As a lyric poet, he is inferior to only Shelley, who is the most lyrical of all the English poets, “a perfect singing God”. Keats was gifted with the power to hear and produce melodies both heard and “unheard”, and “spirit ditties of no tone”. His lyricism is marked with contemplation.
Hellenism of Keats:
Hellenism is derivative from Hellas the ancient name of Greece. It is a familiar word in literary criticism very frequently used in connection with Milton, Keats and Swinburne. Hellenism pertains to the culture, literature and arts of the ancient Greek. There was nothing of Greek culture in Keats's heritage. But he was irresistibly drawn towards everything that was Greek. That shows that his Hellenism was innate or he was a born Greek, a Greek by instinct, a Greek owing to the inborn temperamental “Greekness of his mind”.
The Greeks were great lover of beauty. The love of beauty was celebrated as the supreme ideal in Greek art and literature. Keats is called a Greek because he too had ardent love for beauty and this common object of beauty brought the Greeks and Keats close to each other. Like Shakespeare, Keats had “little Latin and less Greek”. The knowledge of the Greek classics came to him through translations. He studied chapman's translation of Homer and this left a deep impact upon him. It has been rightly pointed out that, “there was in Keats the keenest sense and enjoyment of beauty, and this gave him a fellow - feeling with the Greek masters. He recognised in them the most perfect representers of the beautiful.”
Like the Greeks, Keats was a lover of beauty, beauty not in the abstract but in the concrete. His conception of beauty is intensely sensual; it is lofty and sublime. In his poetry is found a harmonious mingling of the material, the intellectual and the spiritual. It should however be borne in mind that the Greek literature and sculpture had been the main sources of inspiration for Keats. It was amply supplemented and enriched by his innate aesthetic sensibility.
Medievalism:
Medievalism is one the salient characteristics of Keats’ poetry. It is found in abundance in Keats's poetry. The medieval world had a special fascination for Keats. He frequently escaped to the medieval world. For him, this escape was not merely an aesthetic but a psychological necessity. The medieval world provided him with solace which he missed in the life of sordid and harsh reality - the life of the weariness, the fever, the fret, distress and disappointment. He felt ecstasy in the romantic world of the Middle Ages and breathed its essence into his own poetry.
It was through the study of Spenser's Fairy Queene that he came into contact with the medieval world. It attracted him and inspired him to give expression in his poetry to the world of romance and beauty, chivalry and adventure, mystery and enchantment. The medieval spirit that left a powerful impact on Keats has been beautifully summed up: “Love all - embracing, all enduring, faithful unto death; the spirit of nobility and chivalry, the strange, the weird, the adventurous; the touch of fairy land ...”
Keats has incarnated the medieval spirit in poems like Isabella and The Eve of St. Agnes. Mark the following example:
“Legion'd fairies paced the coverlet,
And pale enchantment hold her sleepy - eyed.”
It is most poetically and beautifully expressed in the Ode to a Nightingale:
“The same that oft - times hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.”
His Use of Felicitous Phrasing:
An important trait of Keats's poetry is his “curious felicity” of phrasing. In his poetry we find plenty of his own coined phrases and expressions that show his remarkable power of inventing phrases and expressions that suit his ideas most. Arnold has praised Keats's lucidity lyrically. He observes that “Nothing is more remarkable in Keats than his clear sightedness and lucidity.” Arnold has gone to the extent of leveling him to the status of Shakespeare. “No one else in English poetry, save Shakespeare, has in expression quite the fascinating felicity of Keats, his perfection of loveliness.”
For Keats lucid and felicitous phrasing and expression had supreme importance because in his opinion the poetic art was the most important element of poetry. He felt that Shelley was not so careful about poetic art. So he gave him (Shelley) the following advice: “You, I am sure, will forgive me for remarking that you might curb your magnanimity, and be more of an artist, and load every rift of your subject with ore.” Here it is to be noted that Keats followed his own advice by meticulously choosing and coining expressions that are not only fit for the poetic occasion but also new and original. In fact, he coined a number of expressions which have magical touch and effect. They are full of freshness, vigour and vitality. We find several examples of felicity of phrasing in his Ode to a Nightingale. “Drowsy numbness, full throated ease, sun burnt - mirth, purple stained mouth, verdurous glooms, embalmed darkness, easeful death” etc. are some of the illustrations of his power of coining phrases and expressions. Perfect beauty of expression is attained in the following lines:
“Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn.”
