Keats was deeply influenced by beauty in all its forms, which he saw as the highest aesthetic ideal. For Keats, beauty was truth, and he believed the greatest poetry expressed beauty for its own sake rather than having any didactic purpose. He found beauty everywhere in nature, in art, and in people. Keats viewed the world of beauty as an escape from the pains of reality, and through his poetry he aimed to capture beauty and make it eternal. His concept of beauty encompassed both joy and sorrow, and he believed imagination could reveal deeper aspects of beauty than what is perceptible by the senses alone.

1. Keats’ Concept of Beauty/ Discuss Keats
‘Beauty is Truth; Truth Beauty’.
Keats was considerably influenced by Spenser and was, like Spenser, a passionate
lover of beauty in all its forms and manifestations. The passion of beauty
constitutes his aestheticism. Beauty was his pole star, beauty in nature, in woman
and in art. For him, ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever’.
When we think of Keats, ‘Beauty’ comes to our mind. Keats and Beauty have
become almost synonymous. Wecannotthink of Keats without thinking of
Beauty. Beauty is an abstraction; it does not give out its meaning easily. For Keats,
it is not so. He sees Beauty everywhere. Keats made Beauty his object of wonder
and admiration and he became the greatest poet of Beauty. With Keats the
passion for Beauty was the greatest, rather the only consideration. In the letters
of Keats, we frequently read about his own ideas about Beauty. In one of his
letters to Georgeand Tom, he wrote:
He writes and identifies beauty with truth. Of all the contemporary poets Keats is
one of the most inevitably associated with the love of beauty? He was the most
passionate lover of the world as the career of beautiful images and of many
imaginative associations of an object or word with a heightened emotional
appeal... He could see Beauty everywhere and in every object. Beauty appeared
to him in various forms and shapes—in the flowers and in the clouds, in the hills
and rills, in the song of a bird and in the face of a woman, in a great book and in
the legends of old. Beauty was there in the pieces of stone with carvings thereon.
He hated didacticism in poetry. For the poetry itself was beauty so he wrote, “We
hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us.” ’The lines of his poem
‘Endymion’ have become a maxim:
“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its lovelinessincreases;it will never
Pass intonothingness”
He even disapproved Shelley for subordinating the true end of poetry to the
object of social reform. He dedicated his brief life to the expression of beauty as
For Keats the world of beauty was an escape from the dreary and painful life or
experience. He escaped from the political and social problems of the world into
the realm of imagination. Unlike Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron and Shelley, he

2. remained untouched by revolutionary theories for the regression of mankind. His
later poems such as “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Hyperion” show an increasing
interest in human problems and humanity and if he had lived he would have
established a closer contact with reality. He may overall 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. He aimed at expressing
beauty for its own sake. Keats did not like only those things that are beautiful
according to the recognized standards. He had deep insight to see beauty even in
those things is hostile to beauty for ordinary people. He said:
“I have loved the principle of beauty in all things.”
Keats perceives Beauty through his natural and spontaneous application of
senses. He has an extraordinary sense-perception. He could perceive objects
more intensely than other people. He derived great aesthetic delight at the sight
of objects of Nature, of a fair face, of the works of art, legends old and new. He
derived aesthetic delight through his senses. He looked at autumn and says that
even autumn has beauty and charm:
“Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too”
The appreciation of Beauty in Keats is through mind or spirit. The approach
becomes intellectual as his endorsees in ‘Ode on Grecian Urn’:
“Beauty is truth, truthbeauty -that is all
ye know on earth, and all ye needto know”
Art has captured Beauty of life and made it a truth for all the ages to be “a friend
to man.” It is not the logical reaching after facts that helps in understanding the
truth of things. Keats wrote, ‘What the imagination seizes as beauty must be true’
and it is his powerful assertion. His logic is simple: what is beautiful is truthful.
What is ugly cannot be truthful. Find truth through beauty and beauty through
truth. Beauty is no more a sensuous, physical or sentimental affair. A true poet, in
the words of Keats, enjoys light and shade foul and fair with the same delight.
Thus, his concept of beauty encompasses Joy and Sorrow and Melancholy and
Happiness which cannot be separated. Imagination reveals a new aspect of
beauty, which is ‘sweeter’ than beauty which is perceptible to the senses. The
senses perceive only the external aspect of beauty, but imagination apprehends
its essence.