M.A English (Literature and Linguistic)

1. Keats as a poet
Keats was a conscious artist. He was anxious to load his poetry as fully
as possible with its own special kind of excellence. He gave devoted
critical care to his own poetical development. This is the classical strain
in his poetic craft. During his short career Keats work is always changing
and developing. The two Hyperion’s are as a proof that at his deaths.
Keats seemed to have been on the verge of a further style of growth.
We feel that there was much to come that would have been new and
different.
Keats led a miserable life because of illness and poverty. He sank into
his grave, his senses and heart is unsatisfied. Keats passion for poetry
begins at school. In his early poetry we discover themes of romance
and chivalry from Spencer. Keats had a passion for Homer. His vision of
Greece really came to him through Elizabethan’s and seventh C poetry.
He was exploring a legendry fairyland in his early poetry. The imagery
of Keats earlier poems is not very literary. It is drawn for a very minute
and delicate sensuous observation. It is the delicacy of the perception
that strikes first. He was as sensitive as barometer every inch.
The most important poems of Keats early period are “Sleep and Beauty
“It is an early attempt to formulate his poetic ideals. He describes a
phase of delicate communion with nature and with all the external and
obvious beauty of the world. He derives sensous pleasure from the
beauty of nature. He wonders whether he can afford to give up this
sensuous enjoyment. He said “And I can ever bid these joys” This is the
earliest statement of the problem that haunts Keats throughout his
short life. He had a strong desire to reconcile the beauty of world with
it transience. He had a strong suspicion that beauty cannot be enjoyed

2. for a long time and therefore he could not refrain from choosing any
butterfly that turned up. The odes of Keats are closely bound with the
theme of transience and permanency. Keats on the same theme wrote
simply:
Man in love
And love that vanishes
Keats accepts with stoic resignation the fleeting away of beauty and
movements of happiness. Keats is not capable of this sort of stoicism.
He attempts to reconcile the contradiction. He did not accept with
resignation the passing of the earthly joys. Like typical romantic poet he
tries desperately to find some permanent and unchanging refuge in the
world of flux.
He longs for an age in which the Nightingale will continue pouring her
songs into his ears. Therefore Keats is always the element of conflict. In
Ode to a Nightingale” Keats wants imaginative participation in the
untroubled natural life of the bird. He wants to make happiness last
forever. The poem ends with Keats finding no solution to his conflict.
But he knows that offers a type of permanence .In the seventh stanza
of “Ode to Nightingale” the Nightingale becomes a symbol of art.
Transitory human happiness is given permanence in a different sense
by being embodied in art. Keats died young; he could not do what he
wanted. Keats insists that for the practice of his art an artist’s needs to
know “Beauty is truth, truth beauty. A Thing of beauty is a joy forever.