The Romatic Literature

John Keats as poet

                John Keats was born on October 31, 1795.Keats was attentive artist, concerned to load his poetry as fully as possible with its own particular kind of superiority. Keats as a pictorial poet was essentially presenting in a given poem a series of scenes, and still in the narrative the action does not flow from inside the characters, but is governed pictorially from the outside. He is therefore a painting poet and would have earned Lessing’s censure. But like every great artist he knew that his problem was to work within his inadequacy, and to find a way of conveying what happens in time, for it is only by conversion into dramatic realism that the parts of the verbal painting realize relation and signification.

We see the outcome of it in the faithful critical care he gives to his own poetical development. As we examine his work, we become awake of a constant effort on his part to correct faults in technique and affecting tone .He continuously rejects harmful models and chooses better ones. Above all, he is always thinking out the necessary of his own kind of poetry to the leaving out of everything else.

            Keats was not only aintensely thoughtful poet, he was also the most reflective and motivated artist among the romantics. He took a long time to work free of both his own variable taste and bad influences, and still his mature poems were not always flawless. Keats is one of the most inevitably associated with the love of beauty in the world as the ordinary sense of the carrier of beautiful images and of the various imaginative association of an object or word with whatever might give it a sensitive emotions appeal .Poetry, according to Keats, should be the incarnation of beauty, not a medium for the expression of religious or social philosophy.

                In Keats the emotionof Nature was simpler, more direct, and more objective than in either or these others poets. It was his sense to love and interpret Nature more for her own sake, and take away for the sake of the sympathy which the human mind can read into her with its own working and aspirations. He was gifted with a pleasedimpending into all the beauties of woods and fields .Keats is the poet of the sense  ,and he loves Nature because of his sensuousappeal, his appeal to the sense of sight, the sense of hearing, the sense of smell, the sense of touch. He loves flowers because of their beauty of color,fragrant smell, and softness .He loves streams because of their music .He loves the snow , the moon and rainbow for their visual loveliness .

               Shelley expressed the opinion that , “Keats was a Greek “. Indeed  in which was definitely a representative or Greek idea , in a sense in which Wordsworth and Coleridge and even Shelly were not , the Greek courage came to Keats through literature  ,through sculpture , and through an innate tendency  ,and it is below Hellenic authority as a regulation that he gives of his best .

               The inborn, temperamental “Greekness” of Keats’s mind is to be seen in his love of beauty  .To him ,as to the Greeks , the expression of beauty is the ideal of all art .And for him, as for them beauty is not exclusively material nor spiritual , nor intellectual , but is the fullest development of all that goes to make up human perfection.

            Towards the creating of Greek mythology Keats was attracted by an overmastering pleasure in their beauty , and a natural sympathy with the period of imagination that crated them .He infatuated the Greek instinct for personifying the powers of Nature in visibly defined imaginary shapes endowed with human beauty and half human faculties  .In particular he shows himself possessed and fancy bound by the mythology , as well as by the physical attraction , of the moon. Never was bard in youth so literally moon- struck. Not only had the charm of the myth of the love of the moon- goddess for Endymion interwoven itself in his being with his natural sensibility to the physical and spiritual bring of moonlight, but deeper and more abstract meaning than its own had gathered about the story in his mind .

              Greek myth , and to a smaller extent Greek art and literature , give either his main themes or frequent allusions .Keats’s boyish interest had been nourished by his Elizabethan reading , by Leigh Hunt , by the Elgin Marbles ,and by Wordsworth  .one reason for Keats’s high consider for The Excursion would be the account in the fourth book of the Greek religion of Nature and its imaginative expression in myth. Classical myth had been a very rich element in Renaissance poetry from Spenser to Milton , but had been destroyed by the Augustan rationalism . It revived with the romantic religion of Nature and the imagination.

              Keats had no first – hand knowledge of Greek literature .He resulting his knowledge of the Greek classical from translation and books of reference like “Chapman’s translation of Homer”, and “Lempriere’s classical Dictionary”.

                   According to a critic ,

       “Hyperion is in poetry what the Elgin Marbles are in sculpture  .The calm  grandeur of Greek art  ,its majesty and symmetry and simplicity, its economy of ornament and subordination of parts to the whole , came Keats through his knowledge of these marbles.”

               A pure poet perceives beauty and truth in a new light. His observation is unique to him  .The uniqueness deceit in his poetical character .It suggests that there are no non-poetical elements in his composition. He is concerned with the sensitivity of beauty and truth and the expression of the twain in the simplest but most powerful way .The expositions of a pure poet come from his heart and enter the very hearts of his readers .

                   A .C .Bradeley commenting on the true nature of Keats as a poet wrote that , “while his mind had much general power , he was ,more than wordsworth or Coleridge or Shelly ,a poet pure and simple.”

                Keats ‘s idea of Beauty is a very widespread one. It is not confined to what seems good  ,or beautiful or pleasing , it goes outside these boundaries even to the most painful and unpleasant aspect of life .A true poet must see life as a whole: no aspect of life can be ignored .An significant aspect of his concept of Beauty is to put joy and sorrow together. Joy and sorrow or happiness and melancholy cannot be seen or treasured in isolation. Keats dose not find unalloyed happiness in the world .Happiness is happiness because there is unhappiness .A pure poet loves the two with the same attachment.

               Keats’s is apprehensive with romantic themes. He does not go for any worldly or material consideration .The passion for Beauty with him was the master passion. More or take away, all of us are concerned with Beauty .Poets add an elements of strangeness to it and this makes them romantic .Keats has a synthesis of the classical but the romantic element dominates in him .wish of beauty and curiosity are at the very centre of the art and irritation of Keats .

            Downer pointed out that ,”With Keats no consideration of theology ,humanity or metaphysics mingle with his love of Nature .” He loves every mood and color and movement of Nature without decision any spirit or moral preaching there .He see and appreciates Nature through the five sense .He listens to the music of Nature ,smells the sweet fragrance even in darkness ,would like to touch and taste soft and delicate things of Nature .The poetry of earth is never dead  ,beautifulsights and sounds are there even in autumn. In one of his letters Keats wrote,”The setting sun would always set me to right or if a sparrow were before my window, I take part in his existence and pick about the gravel.”

             The odes of Keats are rich in philosophic content .We cannot say that he writes later for the sake of writing .He writes because there is an insist on in his soul, he writes because he has felt and thought and his feelings and thoughts must come out .Lionel Trilling wrote ,”Keats was nothing if not man of ideas” .His odes richly prove it  . There we get his ideas on life  ,art and love .there Keats seems to be moving “towards immortal longings.”Keats is very particular about his words ,compound words , phrases and sentences .No word is unnecessary  ,no phrase is superfluous. There is decoration and ornamentation .It is necessary as poetry it is not prose .Word must have a brightness and afford delight to the readers . Joy is the end of art his poems give joy to the readers  .Keats uses all his possessions to provide joy to his readers  .There is a sense of comfortable sweetness about his language .He loves words and phrases and uses them for meaningfulness as well as harmonious charm .Keats uses a variety of verse form and adds a lot of music to each form .He uses heroic couplet ,four –line stanza ,blank verse as well as Spenserian stanza. He adds a different beauty to every form .There is nothing severe or harsh about his presentation .Then he writes Odes , Sonnets ,and Poems in ballad forms also .He uses Blank verse very effectively in long narrative poems .

                The Eve of St. Agnes was included in the 1820 volume of Keats’s poems .First it was not much liked by the poet himself .Afterward on he wrote positively of it .It is a love –story with a happy ending written in Spenserian stanza form .Keats wrote this poem at a time when he was much troubled due to a number of factors. He himself was not observance good health and was much troubled on account of his painful throat .He had fallen in love with Fanny Brawne but the love was at a very doubtfulstage. As Drinkwater says,” the Eve of St. Agnes must be reckoned, on the whole, the most splendid of Keats’s poems” .The poem is a work of art ,of beauty and a unique feat of poetical craftsmanship .

                            In this poem the weather was very cold .An old Beadsman sat in the chapel telling his beads of the rosary with his benumbed fingers  .His prayers over  ,he walked to his cell with slow steps .In the chapel there were statues of lords and knights and ladies and they seemed . Revolving northwards, he heard music coming from the hall. He could not enjoy it as he had to pray for the recovery of his own soul and for those of the sinners , but the style of Keats ‘s own and the poemis full of beauties of description  ,imagery ,and color . Typical of its beautiful beauty is the following stanza,

                           Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,

                          And threw warm gules on Madeline’s fair breast ,

                          As down she knelt for heaven’s grace and boon ;

                          Rose –bloom fell on her hands  ,togetherprest,

                              In La Belle Sans Merci was composed on April 21 ,1918 and is directly related with Keats’s feelings for Miss Brawne .The title is derived from a French song written long back in 1424 by Alain Chartier with the title – La Belle Sans Merci .It fascinated Keats .Here the Knight- at – arms met a beautiful lady ,a Faery’s child who certain the knight that she loved him truly. He set her on his pacing steed and rode with her the full day .She got delicious roots and honey of wild flowers for him and then devotedly lulled him to sleep .The fatal enchantress deserted him, left him lonely and miserable on the cold hill’s side where encountered  and asked him why he loitered there with a cold sweat on his  brow he poencountered and asked him why he loitered there with a cold sweat on hisbrow.

             Of the longer poems in the volume, “Lamia” is the most indicative  .It is the story of a beautiful enchantress  ,who turns from a serpent into a glorious woman and fills every human sense with delight  ,until ,as a result of the foolish philosophy of old Apollonius , she vanishes forever from her lover’s sight .The poem is occupied of typically Keatsian pictorial richness , which ,on time,becomes rather excessive .The following explanation of the snake- enchantress is one of the more attractive parts of the story .

 “ She was a Gordian shape of dazzling hue ,

                            Vermillion –spotted ,golden , green ,and blue:

                            Striped like a zebra , freckled like a pard,

                            Eyed like a peacoke  ,and all crimson barr’d;

                           And full of silver moons  ,that, as she breathed, “

                       Together with the longer poems are many shorter pieces of highest beauty .The huge odes like ‘Ode To A Nightingale’ ,’ Ode To A Psyche ‘, ‘ Ode On Autumn’ ,’ Ode To A Grecian Urn’.These are like an invitation to a feast; one who reads them will hardly be fulfilled until he knows more of such amusingpoetry.

 The’Ode To A Nightingale’ is one of the greatest odes of Keats .The poem starts with a happy note .The poet is happy in the happiness of the nightingale as the bird is singing of summer at her full –throated ease .It gives an impression to the poet that the world of the nightingale must be free from the taints of unhappiness and pains.

                          My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

                                 My sense , as thought of hemlock I had drunk,

              He wants a draught of vintage, some old wine so that he may forget all that the nightingale does not know .A draught of wine cooled for long in deep delved earth from the southern parts of France will have great strength .It will transport the poet into the valley flowers, the land of happy life where the peasants and easy folks sing  and dance and enjoy themselves in the bright and pleasant sunlight .

                             Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown

Through  verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

              Here is a contrast between the actual and imaginary .The imagery world of the nightingale is free from all the actual is full of.

        ‘ Ode On A Grecian Urn’ composed in the spring .Here the imagination brain of Keats gave a shape and unity to the different pieces and the Urn that comes to us in the poem is an natural whole.We read the poem and see pictures from the Greek life .This ode contains a powerful message. Here in this poem Keats says ‘Art confers immortality ‘ .The Urn is a better historian in the poets ,it tell a tale and makes its character and their feelings worldly with the message ,

                     ‘Beauty is truth ,truth beauty ‘-that is all

                     Ye know on earth , and all ye need to know.

                 This ode is a ideal image of Keats’s dictum that “a thing of beauty is a joy for ever” .Keats made his urn a thing of beauty and it is a joy forever  .Here Keats blended several threads from his reading and experiences his love of Greek art , the nearness of pain and pleasure , the stormy nature of passion and the severity of the ideal along with the equation of beauty and truth.

               The’ode To Autumn‘has a great thematic issue.First , it illustrates Keats’s thoughts about Beauty .Keats is popularly known as a poet of beauty. It is to be noted that his idea of beauty is not limited to fair faces  ,ravishing sounds and thrilling sights .It is an all comprehensive concept . It includes every aspect of human life .Joy and sorrow  ,pain and pleasure  ,laughter and tears have their individual place and importance in it .Spring is beautiful, so is winter and so is autumn .The treatment of the subject is completely objective or impersonal .The poet keeps himself completely out of the picture . He just describes certain sights and sounds without expressing his personal effect to these sight and sounds .The poem is a perfect nature-lyric .No human sentiment finds expressive, only the beauty and bounty of Nature through autumn are describe .

                            Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!

                                Close bosom friends of maturing sun,

Conspring with him ho wto load and bless

                                 With fruit the vines that round the thatch –eves run;

End of the  poem various sounds of Autumn the choir of gnats ,  the bleating of lambs the singing of cricket  , the whistling of red- breasts and the twittering of swallows .Keats’s interest in small and homely creatures is fully evidenced in Nature and his keen and minute observation of natural sights and sounds .

                            Hedge-cricket sing; and now with treble soft

                           The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft,

                                  And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

               ‘Ode To Psyche’ in the Psyche Greek word for the soul .Keats seems to regard psyche not only as the personification of the human soul but also as the personification of beauty .the poem is significant for its concrete and sensuous imagery  ,which constitutes one of the most striking characteristics of Keats’s poetry  .There is , first of all , the lovely pictureof cupid and psyche lying in an embrace in deep grass ,beneath a roof of leaves and blossoms by the side of Brooklet .Keats imagines the two fair creatures.

 Couched side by side

              In deepest grass, beneath the whispering roof

               Of leaves and trembled blossoms ,where there ran

       A brooklet  ,scarce espied:

                  The poem is characterized by passion and enthusiasm .There is intense feeling and passionate enthusiasm in the lines in which Keats pledges himself to the worship of Psyche.The elaborate and fantastic metaphor of the ending stanza is full of the varied beauty of Nature and myth.

                                And there shall be for thee all soft delight

                                       That shadowy thought can win

                                 A bright torch, ans a casement ope at night,

                                       To let the warm Love in  !

Conclusion:

                             Keats was a very careful artist.He took the greatest pains in revising and polishing his poems .The effect is that we find him using the choicest and most suitable diction .The beauty of his phrase , the subtleties of rhyme in the arrangement of words and their suggestive power.

                                              W.H.Hudson:

“Historically ,Keatsis important for three reasons ,

First ,on the side of form and style he is the most romantic of the romantic poets .

Secondly , more than any other great poet of his time ,he represents the exhaustion of the impulses generated by the social upheaval and the humanitarian enthusiasms of the Revolution .

Finally ,his influence was none the less very strong upon the poets of the succeeding generation.”