john Keats" Ode to a Nightingale"

john Keats" Ode to a Nightingale"

Form
Like most of the other odes, "Ode to a Nightingale" is written in ten-line stanzas. However, unlike most of the other poems, it is metrically variable--though not so much as "Ode to Psyche." The first seven and last two lines of each stanza are written in iambic pentameter; the eighth line of each stanza is written in trimeter, with only three accented syllables instead of five. "Nightingale" also differs from the other odes in that its rhyme scheme is the same in every stanza (every other ode varies the order of rhyme in the final three or four lines except "To Psyche," which has the loosest structure of all the odes). Each stanza in "Nightingale" is rhymed ABABCDECDE, Keats's most basic scheme throughout the odes.
Themes
With "Ode to a Nightingale," Keats's speaker begins his fullest and deepest exploration of the themes of creative expression and the mortality of human life. In this ode, the transience of life and the tragedy of old age ("where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs, / Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies") is set against the eternal renewal of the nightingale's fluid music ("Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!"). The speaker reprises the "drowsy numbness" he experienced in "Ode on Indolence," but where in "Indolence" that numbness was a sign of disconnection from experience, in "Nightingale" it is a sign of too full a connection: "being too happy in thine happiness," as the speaker tells the nightingale. Hearing the song of the nightingale, the speaker longs to flee the human world and join the bird. His first thought is to reach the bird's state through alcohol--in the second stanza, he longs for a "draught of vintage" to transport him out of himself. But after his meditation in the third stanza on the transience of life, he rejects the idea of being "charioted by Bacchus and his pards" (Bacchus was the Roman god of wine and was supposed to have been carried by a chariot pulled by leopards) and chooses instead to embrace, for the first time since he refused to follow the figures in "Indolence," "the viewless wings of Poesy."
The rapture of poetic inspiration matches the endless creative rapture of the nightingale's music and lets the speaker, in stanzas five through seven, imagine himself with the bird in the darkened forest. The ecstatic music even encourages the speaker to embrace the idea of dying, of painlessly succumbing to death while enraptured by the nightingale's music and never experiencing any further pain or disappointment. But when his meditation causes him to utter the word "forlorn," he comes back to himself, recognizing his fancy for what it is--an imagined escape from the inescapable ("Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well / As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf"). As the nightingale flies away, the intensity of the speaker's experience has left him shaken, unable to remember whether he is awake or asleep.
In "Indolence," the speaker rejected all artistic effort. In "Psyche," he was willing to embrace the creative imagination, but only for its own internal pleasures. But in the nightingale's song, he finds a form of outward expression that translates the work of the imagination into the outside world, and this is the discovery that compels him to embrace Poesy's "viewless wings" at last. The "art" of the nightingale is endlessly changeable and renewable; it is music without record, existing only in a perpetual present. As befits his celebration of music, the speaker's language, sensually rich though it is, serves to suppress the sense of sight in favour of the other senses. He can imagine the light of the moon, "But here there is no light"; he knows he is surrounded by flowers, but he "cannot see what flowers" are at his feet. This suppression will find its match in "Ode on a Grecian Urn," which is in many ways a companion poem to "Ode to a Nightingale." In the later poem, the speaker will finally confront a created art-object not subject to any of the limitations of time; in "Nightingale," he has achieved creative expression and has placed his faith in it, but that expression--the nightingale's song--is spontaneous and without physical manifestation.
Commentary on ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE
In this meditation on poetic experience, the poet attempts to conceptualise a reconciliation of beauty and permanence through the symbol of the Nightingale The poet begins by explaining the nature and cause of the sadness he is experiencing, a sadness translated into a physical ache and a drowsy numbness. He feels as he might if he had taken some poison or sedating drug. This feeling is, in fact, the result of a deep awareness of the happiness of the nightingale he hears singing. His resulting pleasure is so intense it has become painful. He longs for some intoxicant that will let him achieve union with the nightingale, take him out of the world, and allow him to forget human suffering and despair and the transience of all experience. Wine, however, is rejected in favour of the poetic imagination. He enters some twilight region of the mind. While he can see nothing, the other senses feed his imagination, constructing within his mind what cannot be seen in fact. This prompts him to contemplate leaving the world altogether. He realises, however, that the ultimate form of forgetfulness, of escape from the troubles of life, would be death. Death at such a moment, listening to the nightingale pouring forth its soul in ecstasy, would be the supreme ending. And yet death is rejected. As the poet realises, the bird would sing on, and he would be unable to hear it. While all humans must die, the nightingale is, in some sense, immortal. The poet, thinking back to the classical world of the Roman emperors and to the Old Testament world of Ruth, considers how its song has been heard for so many centuries. Keats takes us even further back, into a fairy world, a landscape both magical and yet forlorn. With this word `forlorn', the spell is broken: the poet returns to the self, to the present. Fancy, he claims, has failed him once more. He again becomes aware of the landscape around him and the bird's song begins to fade, leaving him wondering whether his experience was a vision or a waking dream.
The nightingale has traditionally been associated with love. The influential myth of Philomela turned into a nightingale after being raped and tortured, stresses melancholy and suffering in association with love. It has also been associated with poetry. Keats no doubt knew Coleridge's two poems `To the Nightingale' (1796) and `The Nightingale: "A Conversation Poem"', and, according to his letters, only days before writing this ode he had talked with the older poet on such subjects as nightingales, poetry and poetical sensation.
Why did Keats choose the nightingale's song as the basis of meditation in this poem? Is he drawing upon its traditional associations or not? Such critics as Helen Vendler believe that in the choice of music Keats finds a symbol of pure beauty, non-representational, without any reference to ideas, to moral or social values. The nightingale's song is vocal, but without verbal content, and can serve as a pure expressive beauty. Others have argued that it represents the music of nature, which can be contrasted with human art, verbal or musical.
The poem is basically structured around the contrast between the poet, who is earthbound, and the bird, which is free. A related opposition is that between the mortal world, full of sorrow and marked by transience, and the world of the nightingale, marked by joy and immortality. One of the points that have troubled many critics is this claim of immortality for the nightingale: 'Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!' (line 61). The nightingale is, after all, a natural creature. It has been suggested that Keats is referring not to the individual bird, but to the species. This solution has been strongly criticised, however, as humanity, the `hungry generations' (line 62), could also be credited with such immortality as a species. An alternative suggestion is that the nightingale addressed in stanza 7 is purely symbolic; is this solution more convincing? If so, what does the nightingale symbolise? A further interpretation might be that, since the nightingale sings only at night and was traditionally thought of, therefore, as invisible, it, through its `disembodied' song, transcends the material world (so in that sense is immortal); and here Keats is talking about `embalmed darkness', an atmosphere of death.
Another problematic point is Keats's final question on the status of his experience: `Was it a vision or a waking dream?' (line 79). Some critics have decidedly affirmed that the poem is about the inadequacy of the imagination, a rejection of the `deceiving elf' (line 79). Others see more ambivalence in Keats's attitude. After the possibility of joining the bird in its immortal world has been rejected as a trick of the fancy, they would argue, Keats still suggests through his final question that such vision or transcendent experience is possible, or, at least, still something for which he longs. Is this, ultimately, an escapist poem, or is Keats emphasising the need to accept the human condition, with all the suffering that is associated with it? Compare the ode, in this respect, with the `Ode on Melancholy'.
Language is effectively used to create a mood. In the opening of the poem, for example, a sense of sluggish weightiness is suggested by the heavy thudding alliterative `d', `p', and' when Keats describes his own dull ache. Compare this with the effects created in the second half of the stanza by the light assonantal sounds in such words as `light' and `Dryad' and the sensuous assonantal sounds of 'beechen', `green' and `ease' when Keats turns to the joy of the nightingale. Compare the vitality and the jubilant tempo of stanza 2 with the dull heaviness and monotony in stanza 3. How are these different effects created? Consider, for a start, the use of repetition, with devices like parallelism and anaphora. There is a dense concentration of sense impressions in this ode, and a frequent use of synaesthesia. In stanza 1, for example, the `plot' where the bird sings is itself `melodious' and the song contains `summer': the visual evokes the aural and the aural the visual. In stanza 2, Keats conveys the taste of wine with reference to colour, action, song and sensation. When Keats says, in stanza 5, `I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, / Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs', the suggestion that the incense could be seen emphasises the density and headiness of the perfume: it is so strong it seems visible, tangible. This is often said to be the most personal of the odes. Perhaps it would be better to say that from the abrupt opening of:"My heart aches' onwards, it creates the impression of being the most subjective. Leaving aside the claim by many critics that it is personal in an autobiographical way, how is this impression of subjectivity achieved? It is the processes and movement of the poet's mind that are the central focus of `Ode to a Nightingale', and the personal `I' is very much in evidence. In this respect compare the poem with the `Ode on a Grecian Urn'.
Lethe-wards (Greek myth) Lethe is one of the rivers of Hades; the dead are obliged to drink from it in order that they may forget everything said and done when alive
Dryad a tree nymph
Hippocrene (Greek myth) the fountain of the Muses on Mount Helicon and therefore associated with poetic inspiration; here the term is used to suggest red wine as another source of inspiration
Bacchus and his pards (Roman myth) the god of wine; the pards are the leopards which draw his chariot
Fays fairies
Darkling in the dark
Synaesthesia: A sensation that usually only affects one sense is used to trigger a response in another.

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Keats' concept of beauty

Keats' concept of 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 a woman and in art.
“A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”
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. Poetry, according to Keats, should be the incarnation of beauty, not a medium for the expression of religious or social philosophy. He hated didacticism in poetry.
“We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us.”

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.”
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 he said:
“I have loved the principle of beauty in all things.”
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 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 that are not thought beautiful by ordinary people. He looked at autumn and says that even autumn has beauty and charm:
“Where are the song of Spring? Ay, where are they?Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, –
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue.”
In Keats, we have a remarkable contrast both with Byron on the one side and with Shelley on the other. Keats was neither rebel nor a utopian dreamer. Endowed with a purely artistic nature, he took up in regard to all the movements and conflicts of his time, a position of almost complete detacher. He knew nothing of Byron’s stormy spirit of the hostility of the existing order of things and he had no sympathy with Shelley’s humanitarian and passion for reforming the world. The famous opening line of “Endymion”, ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever’ strikes the keynote of his work. As the modern world seemed to him to be hard, cold and prosaic, he habitually sought an imaginative escape from it. He loved nature just for its own sake and for the glory and loveliness which he found in it, and no modern poet has ever been nearer than he was to the simple “poetry for earth” but there was nothing mystical in love and nature was never fraught for him, as for Wordsworth and Shelley, with spiritual message and meanings.
Keats was not only the last but also the most perfect of the Romantics while Scott was merely telling stories, and Wordsworth reforming poetry or upholding the moral law, and Shelley advocating the impossible reforms and Byron voicing his own egoism and the political measure. Worshipping beauty like a devotee, perfectly content to write what was in his own heart or to reflect some splendor of the natural world as he saw or dreamed it to be, he had the noble idea that poetry exists for its own sake and suffers loss by being devoted to philosophy or politics.
Disinterested love of beauty is one of the qualities that made Keats great and that distinguished him from his great contemporaries. He grasped the essential oneness of beauty and truth. His creed did not mean the beauty of form alone. His ideal was the Greek ideal of beauty inward and outward, the perfect soul of verse and the perfect form. Precisely because he held this ideal, he was free from the wish to preach.
Keats’ early sonnets are largely concerned with poets, pictures, sculptures or the rural solitude in which a poet might nurse his fancy. His great odes have for their subjects a storied Grecian Urn; a nightingale; the goddess Psyche, mistress of Cupid; the melancholy and indolence of a poet; and the season of autumn, to which he turns from the songs of spring. What he asked of poesy, of wine, or of nightingale’s song was to help him:
“Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget,
What thou amongst the leaves hast never known,The weariness, the fever and the fret,Here, where men sit and hear each other groan.”
“I Stood Tiptoe Upon a Little Hill” and “Sleep and Poetry” – the theme of both these poems is that lovely things in nature suggest lovely tales to the poet, and great aim of a poet is to be a friend to soothe the cares and lift the thoughts of man. Perhaps Keats would have said that he attempted his nobler life of poetry in poems like “Lamia” and “Hyperion” but it is very doubtful whether he believed that he had done justice to this elevated type of poetic creation.
Keats’ love of beauty is not ‘Platonic’ in nature. He loves physical objects and takes interest in human body. He does not become obscene but his love of beauty gives us very attractive and suggestive picture of women:
“Yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel forever its soft fall and swell,Awake forever in a sweet unrest,Still, still to hear her tender taken breath,And so live ever.”
Religion for him took definite shape in the adoration of the beautiful, an adoration which he developed into a doctrine. Beauty is the supreme truth. It is imagination that discovers beauty. This idealism assumes a note of mysticism. One can see a sustained allegory in “Endymion” and certain passages are most surely possessed of a symbolical value. Sidney Colvin says:
“It was not Keats aim merely to create a paradise of art and beauty discovered from the cares and interests of the world. He did aim at the creation and revelation of beauty, but of beauty whatever its element existed. His concept of poetry covered the whole range of life and imagination.”

As he did not live long enough, he was not able to fully illustrate the vast range of his conception of beauty. Fate did not give him time enough to fully unlock the ‘mysteries of the heart’ and to illuminate and put in proper perspective the great struggles and problems of human life.

Read more »

Keat's concept of Beauty

Keat's concept of 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 the woman and in art.
“A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”
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. Poetry, according to Keats, should be the incarnation of beauty, not a medium for the expression of religious or social philosophy. He hated didacticism in poetry.
“We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us.”

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.”
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 he said:
“I have loved the principle of beauty in all things.”
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 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 that are not thought beautiful by ordinary people. He looked at autumn and says that even autumn has beauty and charm:
“Where are the song of Spring? Ay, where are they?Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, –While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue.”
In Keats, we have a remarkable contrast both with Byron on the one side and with Shelley on the other. Keats was neither rebel nor a utopian dreamer. Endowed with a purely artistic nature, he took up in regard to all the movements and conflicts of his time, a position of almost complete detacher. He knew nothing of Byron’s stormy spirit of the hostility of the existing order of things and he had no sympathy with Shelley’s humanitarian and passion for reforming the world. The famous opening line of “Endymion”, ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever’ strikes the keynote of his work. As the modern world seemed to him to be hard, cold and prosaic, he habitually sought an imaginative escape from it. He loved nature just for its own sake and for the glory and loveliness which he found in it, and no modern poet has ever been nearer than he was to the simple “poetry for earth” but there was nothing mystical in love and nature was never fraught for him, as for Wordsworth and Shelley, with spiritual message and meanings.
Keats was not only the last but also the most perfect of the Romantics while Scott was merely telling stories, and Wordsworth reforming poetry or upholding the moral law, and Shelley advocating the impossible reforms and Byron voicing his own egoism and the political measure. Worshipping beauty like a devotee, perfectly content to write what was in his own heart or to reflect some splendor of the natural world as he saw or dreamed it to be, he had the noble idea that poetry exists for its own sake and suffers loss by being devoted to philosophy or politics.
Disinterested love of beauty is one of the qualities that made Keats great and that distinguished him from his great contemporaries. He grasped the essential oneness of beauty and truth. His creed did not mean the beauty of form alone. His ideal was the Greek ideal of beauty inward and outward, the perfect soul of verse and the perfect form. Precisely because he held this ideal, he was free from the wish to preach.
Keats’ early sonnets are largely concerned with poets, pictures, sculptures or the rural solitude in which a poet might nurse his fancy. His great odes have for their subjects a storied Grecian Urn; a nightingale; the goddess Psyche, mistress of Cupid; the melancholy and indolence of a poet; and the season of autumn, to which he turns from the songs of spring. What he asked of poesy, of wine, or of nightingale’s song was to help him:
“Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget,What thou amongst the leaves hast never known,The weariness, the fever and the fret,Here, where men sit and hear each other groan.”
“I Stood Tiptoe Upon a Little Hill” and “Sleep and Poetry” – the theme of both these poems is that lovely things in nature suggest lovely tales to the poet, and great aim of the poet is to be a friend to soothe the cares and lift the thoughts of man. Perhaps Keats would have said that he attempted his nobler life of poetry in poems like “Lamia” and “Hyperion” but it is very doubtful whether he believed that he had done justice to this elevated type of poetic creation.
Keats’ love of beauty is not ‘Platonic’ in nature. He loves physical objects and takes interest in human body. He does not become obscene but his love of beauty gives us very attractive and suggestive picture of women:
“Yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,To feel forever its soft fall and swell,Awake forever in a sweet unrest,Still, still to hear her tender taken breath,And so live ever.”
Religion for him took definite shape in the adoration of the beautiful, an adoration which he developed into a doctrine. Beauty is the supreme truth. It is imagination that discovers beauty. This idealism assumes a note of mysticism. One can see a sustained allegory in “Endymion” and certain passages are most surely possessed of a symbolical value. Sidney Colvin says:
“It was not Keats aim merely to create a paradise of art and beauty discovered from the cares and interests of the world. He did aim at the creation and revelation of beauty, but of beauty whatever its element existed. His concept of poetry covered the whole range of life and imagination.”


As he did not live long enough, he was not able to fully illustrate the vast range of his conception of beauty. Fate did not give him time enough to fully unlock the ‘mysteries of the heart’ and to illuminate and put in proper perspective the great struggles and problems of human life.

Read more »

Keat's sensuousness

Keat's sensuousness



Keats is a mystic of the senses and not of thoughts as he sought to apprehend the ultimate truth of the universe through aesthetic sensations and not through philosophical thoughts.


Sensuousness is a quality in poetry which affects the senses i.e. hearing, seeing, touching, smelling and tasting. Sensuous poetry does not present ideas and philosophical thoughts. It gives delight to senses, appeals to our eyes by presenting beautiful and colorful word pictures to our ears by its metrical music and musical sounds, to our nose by arousing the sense of smell and so on.


Keats is the worshiper of beauty and peruses beauty everywhere, and it is his senses that first reveal to him the beauty of things. He writes poetry only out of what he feels upon his pulses. Thus, it is his sense impressions that kindled his imagination which makes him realize the great principle that:


‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’


Keats loves nature for its own sake. He has a straightforward passion for nature by giving his whole soul to the unalloyed enjoyment of its sensuous beauty.


Poetry originates from sense impressions and all poets are more or less sensuous. Sense impressions are the starting point of the poetic process. It is what the poet sees and hears that excites his emotions and imagination. The emotional and imaginative reaction to sense impressions generates poetry.


The poets give the impressions receive by their eyes only. Wordsworth’s imagination is stirred by what he sees and hears in nature. Milton is no less sensitive to the beauty of nature, of the flowers in “Paradise Lost” in a sensuous manner. But Keats’ poetry appeals to our sense of sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch and sense of hot and cold. He exclaims in one of his letters:


O for a life of sensation than of thoughts


He is a pure poet in sense of seeking not sensual but sensuous delight.


SENSE OF SIGHT: Keats is a painter of words. In a few words, he presents a concrete and solid picture of sensuous beauty.


“Her hair was long, her foot was light
And her eyes were wild.”


And in “Ode on Grecian Urn” again the sense of sight is active.


“O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with bread
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;”


SENSE OF HEARING: The music of nightingale produces pangs of pain in poet’s heart.


“The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days, by emperor and clown:”


In “Ode on Grecian Urn” he says:


“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;”


SENSE OF TOUCH: The opening lines of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” describe extreme cold:


“The sedge is withered from the lake
And no birds sing.”


SENSE OF TASTE: In “Ode to Nightingale”, Keats describes different kinds of wine and the idea of their tastes in intoxication.


“O for a beaker full of the warm South
Full of the true the blushful Hippocrene,”


SENSE OF SMELL: In “Ode to Nightingale”, the poet can’t see the flowers in darkness. There is mingled perfume of many flowers.


“I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet.”


Perhaps the best example of Keats sensuousness is “Ode to Autumn”. In this ode, the season of autumn is described in sensuous terms in which all senses are called forth.


“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness
Close bosom friend of the maturing sun;”


For Keats Autumn is the season of apples on mossed cottage tree, of fruits which are ripe to the core and of later flowers for bees. Thus autumn to Keats is full of pictures of delights of sense. There are the ripe fruit and ripe grains and also there is music that appeals to the ear.


The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft.


Keats is a poet of sensations. His thought is enclosed in sensuousness. In the epithets he uses are rich in sensuous quality – delicious face, melodious plot, sunburnt mirth, embalmed darkness and anguish moist. Not only are the sense perceptions of Keats are quick and alert but he has the rare gift of communicating these perceptions by concrete and sound imagery.


As time passes Keats mind matured and he expresses an intellectual and spiritual passion. He begins to see not only their beauty but also in their truth which makes Keats the “inheritor of unfulfilled renown”.


Keats is more poet of sensuousness than a poet of contemplation. Sometimes he passes from sensuousness to sentiments. In his mature works like Odes or the Hyperion, the poet mixes sensuousness with sentiments, voluptuousness with vitality, aestheticism with intellectualism. However, the nucleus of Keats’ poetry is sensuousness. It is his senses which revealed him the beauty of things, the beauty of universe from the stars of the sky to the flowers of the wood.




Keats’ pictorial senses are not vague or suggestive but made definite with a wealth of artistic detail. Every stanza, every line is replete with sensuous beauty. No other poet except Shakespeare could show such a mastery of language and felicity of sensuousness.

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John Keats

John Keats


(1795-1821) was born in London because the son of a prosperous livery-stable manager. He was the oldest of 4 youngsters, United Nations agency remained deeply dedicated to one another. Thomas, his father, was the chief ostler at the Swan and Hoop. once their father died in 1804 in a very riding accident, Keats's mother, Frances Jennings poet, remarried however the wedding was shortly broken. She captive with the youngsters, John and his sister Fanny and brothers St. George and Tom, to measure together with her mother at Edmonton, close to London. She died of TB in 1810.

At school poet browse wide. He was educated at the progressive Clarke's faculty in Enfield, wherever he began a translation of the epic poem. Keats, United Nations agency was barely 5 feet tall, wasn't apprehend at college for his enthusiasm for books, however his fighting. "My mind has been the foremost malcontent and restless one that ever was place into a body too tiny for it," he wrote. 1811 poet was unfree to a surgeon-apothecary. whereas learning for the licence, he completed his translation of epic poem. Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene affected him deeply and his 1st literary work, written in 1814, was 'Lines in Imitation of Spenser.' in this year he captive to London and resumed his surgical studies in 1815 as a student at Guy's hospital. Next year he became a student of the Society of Apothecaries and was allowed to follow surgery. Before devoting himself entirely to poetry, poet worked as a dresser and junior house Dr.. In London he had met writer, the editor of the leading liberal magazine of the day, The Examiner. He introduced poet to alternative young Romantics, together with Shelley, and printed within the magazine Keats's sonnet, 'O Solitude'.

Keats's 1st book, Poems, was printed in 1817. Sales were poor. He spent the spring along with his brother Tom and friends at Shankin. it had been concerning this point poet began to use his letters because the vehicle of his thoughts of poetry. They mixed the everyday events of his own life with comments along with his correspondence. Among others T.S. Eliot thought-about the letters within the Use of Poetry and therefore the Use of Criticism (1933) "certainly the foremost notable and most significant ever written by any English author," however conjointly same concerning Keats's notable Hyperion: "it contains nice lines, however I don't apprehend whether or not it's an excellent literary work." the primary of his notable letters poet wrote to Benjamin Bailey on November twenty two, 1817. "You maybe at just the once thought there was such issue as Worldly Happiness to be got hold of, at bound periods of your time marked out - you have got necessity from your disposition been therefore light-emitting diode away - I scarcely bear in mind investigating upon any Happiness". Endymion, Keats's 1st long literary work appeared, once he was twenty one. It told in 4000 lines of the love of the moon divinity Cynthia for the young shepherd Endymion. it had been attacked among others by John Wilson Croker and John Gibson Lochard, United Nations agency wrote in Blackwood's capital Magazine: '... it's even as abundant to try to to with Hellenic Republic because it has with "old geographical area the fierce;" no man, whose mind has ever been imbued with the tiniest information or feeling of classical poetry or classical history, may have unerect to profane and vulgarize each association within the manner that has been adopted by this "son of promise."' though the vital reaction was lukewarm, poet wasn't discouraged by it, however wrote to Richard Woodhouse: "I am formidable of doing the globe some good: if I ought to be spared which {will|that will} be the work of mature years - within the interval i'll assay to achieve to as high a summit in Poetry because the nerve given upon Maine will suffer." Keats's greatest works were written within the late 1810s, among them vampire, The Eve of St. Agnes, the good odes and 2 versions of Titan. He worked concisely as a theatrical critic for The Champion, spent summer of 1818 road the Lakes, European country and Northern Ireland. throughout his journey, that he created along with his friend Charles Brown, a man of affairs, he vowed: "I shall learn poetry here and shall henceforward write over ever." once returning to London he spent future 3 months attending his brother Tom, United Nations agency was seriously unwell with TB.

After Tom's death in December, poet captive to Hampstead to measure with Charles Brown. shortly he fell enamored with Fanny Brown, the girl of a single neighbor, and that they were betrothed. within the winter of 1818-19 he worked chiefly on Titan and therefore the Eve of St Agnes. The fragmental Eve of St Mark were composed throughout a visit to his friend Charles Wentworth Dilke's oldsters and relatives in geographic area. In 1819 poet finished vampire, and wrote another version of Titan, known as the autumn of Titan. His notable literary work 'Ode on a Greek Urn' was impressed by a Wedgwood copy of a Roman copy of a Greek jar. Josiah Wedgwood's copy was purchased by Sir William Hamilton, United Nations agency oversubscribed it to the noblewoman of Portland. She denoted the jar to British people repository in 1784.

In 1820 appeared the second volume of poet poems. It gained an enormous vital success. However, poet was suffering at that point from TB. His poems were marked with unhappiness partially as a result of he was too poor to marry Fanny Brawne. poet stony-broke off his engagement and started what he known as a "posthumous existence." in a very letter from 1819 he had written. "I love you additional in this i feel you have got likable Maine for my very own sake and zip else. I actually have met with ladies whom I relay assume would really like to be married to a literary work and given away by a completely unique." once his condition step by step worsened, he sailed for European nation in September with the painter Joseph Severn, to flee England's cold winter. Declining Shelley's invite to affix him at metropolis, poet visited Rome, wherever he took up residence in rooms dominating the place di Spagna. He died in Rome at the age of twenty five, on February twenty three, 1821, and was buried within the Protestant necropolis. poet failed to invent his own epitaph, however remembered words from the play Philaster, or Love Lies-Ableeding, written by Beaumont and Fletcher in 1611. "All your higher deeds / Shall be in water instrument," one in all the characters says. poet told his friend Joseph Severn that he needed on his grave simply the road, "Here lies one whose name was instrument in water."

In spite of early harsh criticism, Keats's name grew once his death. The poet's letters were printed in 1848 and 1878. Keats's works have influenced among others The Pre-Raphaelites, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde and Alfred Tennyson. Some later poets have attacked poet and therefore the Romantics: for T.S. Eliot Byron was "a disorderly mind, ANd an uninteresting one" and poet and Shelley were "not nearly such nice poets as they're imagined to be". saint Motion claims in his chronicle on poet (1998) that the author was passionate about sex and had contagion and these aspects of the poets life were hidden by early biographers, United Nations agency underlined Keats's impoverishment, poor health, and misunderstanding criticism.

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John Keats (1795-1821)

John Keats (1795-1821)
John Keats, the writer of the second generation of the Romantic Age learned a lot of of his English poetry before reaching the age of fifteen. At the age of twenty he qualified at Guy’s Hospital as associate apothecary-surgeon, however determined to be a writer.
Keats’s name rose at his death and has not fallen. His notable trails within the sonnet kind helped him devise the stanzas employed in his Odes. within the couplets of Endymion and also the blank-verse of the unfinished Titan, his fertile mind tends to run on: his imagination responded impulsively to aesthetic beauty, in women, in nature or in art, and in verse and language themselves. Stanza-form controlled his sentences and concern treated his thought, and his slate unstanzaic poems, vampire and also the Fall of Titan.
Sleep and Poetry may be a title that points to Keats’s lasting concern concerning the morality of imagination, and also the advanced relationships between art and skill. within the Fall of Titan, he's told that “the writer and also the dreamer square measure distinct, /Diverse, sheer opposite, antipodes.
Between Apr and September 1819 Keats wrote six Odes. In his Odes to the Nightingale, the Balkan state Urn and time of year, Keats has a lot of of the grandeur of Wordsworth’s “Immorality Ode’, the evocativeness of Coleridge’s ‘Dejection Ode’ and also the intensity of Shelley’s apostrophe to the air current. His Odes dramatize the struggle between desire and thinking. His major Odes square measure beautifully organized.
Keats might need equalled Wordsworth in magnitude as he did in quality. Alfred Tennyson thought Keats the best 19th-century writer, and T.S Eliot, no friend of the private cult in poetry, judges Keats’s letters ‘certainly the foremost notable and most vital ever written by any English poet’.

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Salient features of Keats' poetry

 Salient features of Keats' poetry --


Romanticism primarily was a revolt against the synthetic, pseudo-classical poetry in eighteenth Century. William Wordsworth was the founding father of this movement. Romantic poets is divided into 2 teams – recent Romantics and Young Romantics. In recent Romantics there square measure William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Scott. Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Scott belong to Early Romantics, whereas poet, Shelley, and Byron represent the Later Romantics. Among all the Romantics, poet was the last to born and initial to die. however quite amazingly he achieved in twenty six years what alternative couldn't get ever the total of their life. poet is additionally aforesaid to be the foremost romantic of all the romantics. He was greatly impressed by Greek art, culture and mythology. He was conjointly impressed by Elizabethan poets particularly poet.

Keats may be a pure romantic writer. He writes poetry for the sake of poetry. He believes in art for art’s sake. He doesn't write poetry for any palpable style or any info. His major concern is to provide pleasure. It means his chief concern is pleasure. Whereas another romantics are writing poetry for the propagation of their objectives as William Wordsworth and Shelley were within the favour of French Revolution. however poet is least concern with the social problems with life.

Love for nature is that the chief characteristic of all he romantics. poet conjointly loves nature however he loves nature for the sake of nature. He doesn't offer any theory or ideology regarding nature. He solely admires the wonder of nature. however on the opposite hand, William Wordsworth spiritualizes nature, Samuel Taylor Coleridge finds some supernatural components in nature, Shelley intellectualizes nature and Byron is fascinated by the vigorous aspects of nature.

Keats was a pure writer as he doesn't project any theory in his poetry. poet believes in Negative Capability – the potential of being impersonal. poet doesn't involve his personal feelings in his poetry. He writes poetry just for pleasure however Shelley lacks Negative Capability. Shelley lends his personal sorrow and feeling in his poetry. He couldn't be impersonal and writes regarding his feelings and sorrows.

Keats may be a aesthetical writer. It means he writes his poetry together with his penta senses. we have a tendency to not solely fancy his poetry rather we will style, touch, see and listen to all the concepts given in his poetry. we have a tendency to fancy his poetry with all our penta sense. the total of our body is concerned in his poetry once we scan him. Keats’ representational process|representational process} is static and concrete whereas Shelley’s imagery is dynamic and abstract. Keats’ representational process shows the calmness of Keats’ mind whereas Shelley’s poetry shows his neurotic and confusing angle.

Keats was conjointly Hellenistic like all romantics. He was impressed by principle. principle was the soul of his poetry. There square measure several Hellenistic options in his poetry like his Greek instinct, his love for Greek literature, his love with Greek sculpture and art, his Greek temperament, his love for beauty and also the bit of determinism and tragedy. His angle of melancholy is additionally Hellenistic.

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Keat's Sensuousness

Keat's Sensuousness



Keats is a mystic of the senses and not of thoughts as he sought to apprehend the ultimate truth of the universe through aesthetic sensations and not through philosophical thoughts.


Sensuousness is a quality in poetry which affects the senses i.e. hearing, seeing, touching, smelling and tasting. Sensuous poetry does not present ideas and philosophical thoughts. It gives delight to senses, appeals to our eyes by presenting beautiful and coulourful word pictures to our ears by its metrical music and musical sounds, to our nose by arousing the sense of smell and so on.


Keats is the worshiper of beauty and peruses beauty everywhere; and it is his senses that first reveal to him the beauty of things. He writes poetry only out of what he feels upon his pulses.


Thus, it is his sense impressions that kindled his imagination which makes him realize the great principle that: 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'


Keats loves nature for its own sake. He has a straightforward passion fro nature by giving his whole soul to the unalloyed enjoyment of its sensuous beauty.


Poetry originates from sense impressions and all poets are more or less sensuous. Sense impressions are the starting point of poetic process. It is what the poet sees and hears that excites his emotions and imagination. The emotional and imaginative reaction to sense impressions generate poetry. The poets give the impressions receive by their eyes only. Wordsworth's imagination is stirred by what he sees and hears in nature. Milton is no less sensitive to the beauty of nature, of the flowers in "Paradise Lost" in a sensuous manner. But Keats' poetry appeals to our sense of sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch and sense of hot and cold. He exclaims in one of his letters:


O for a life of sensation than of thoughts


He is a pure poet in sense of seeking not sensual but sensuous delight.


SENSE OF SIGHT: Keats is a painter of words. In a few words he presents a concrete and solid picture of sensuous beauty.


"Her hair was long, her foot was light
And her eyes were wild."


And in "Ode on Grecian Urn" again the sense of sight is active.


"O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;"


SENSE OF HEARING: The music of nightingale produces pangs of pain in poet's heart.


"The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days, by emperor and clown:"


In "Ode on Grecian Urn" he says:


"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;"


SENSE OF TOUCH: The opening lines of "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" describe extreme cold:


"The sedge is withered from the lake
And no birds sing."


SENSE OF TASTE: In "Ode to Nightingale", Keats describes different kinds of wine and the idea of their tastes in intoxication.


"O for a beaker full of the warm South
Full of the true the blushful Hippocrene,"


SENSE OF SMELL: In "Ode to Nightingale", the poet can't see the flowers in darkness. There is mingled perfume of many flowers.


"I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet."


Perhaps the best example of Keats sensuousness is "Ode to Autumn". In this ode the season of autumn is described in sensuous terms in which all senses are called forth.


"Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness
Close bosom friend of the maturing sun;"


For Keats Autumn is the season of apples on mossed cottage tree, of fruits which are ripe to the core and of later flowers for bees. Thus autumn to Keats is full of pictures of delights of sense. There is the ripe fruit and ripe grains and also there is music that appeals to the ear.


The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft.


Keats is a poet of sensations. His thought is enclosed in sensuousness. In the epithets he uses are rich in sensuous quality - delicious face, melodious plot, sunburnt mirth, embalmed darkness and anguish moist. Not only are the sense perceptions of Keats are quick and alert but he has the rare gift of communicating these perceptions by concrete and sound imagery. As time passes Keats mind matured and he expresses an intellectual and spiritual passion. He begins to see not only their beauty but also in their truth which makes Keats the "inheritor of unfulfill'd renown".


Keats is more poet of sensuousness than a poet of contemplation. Sometimes he passes from sensuousness to sentiments. In his mature works like Odes or the Hyperion, the poet mixes sensuousness with sentiments, voluptuousness with vitality, aestheticism with intellectualism. However the nucleus of Keats' poetry is sensuousness. It is his senses which revealed him the beauty of things, the beauty of universe from the stars of the sky to the flowers of the wood.


Keats' pictorial senses are not vague or suggestive but made definite with a wealth of artistic detail. Every stanza, every line is replete with sensuous beauty. No other poet except Shakespeare could show such a mastery of language and felicity of sensuousness..

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