University of Leipzig

PS: Romantic Poetry
Wintersemester 2001/2002

Nature and Beauty in Keats′s Great Odes

by

Bertolino Paola

1. Introduction

2. Interpretation
2.1. Keats′s thought
2.1.1. Keats and Beauty
2.1.2. Keats and Nature
2.2. Keats′s Odes
2.2.1. Ode on a Grecian Urn
2.2.2. Ode to a Nightingale
2.2.3. To Autumn

3. Conclusion

Bibliography

1. Introduction

This writing focuses itself on John Keats, who lived a short time between the 18^th and the 19^th century (he was born in 1795 and died in 1821), and his conception of Beauty and Nature. He is considered to have been of great importance at his time, since, by exalting Beauty, he grew as a source of inspiration to many English 19^th-century poets, becoming the idol of such writers as Tennyson, Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites, as well as Oscar Wilde and the aesthetes, who saw in his cult of Beauty the exaltation of Art for Art′s sake. Like most of the literature of the Romantic period, Keats′s poetry mirrors the tension between actuality and ideal perfection, always trying to reach it.

After providing a short summary of Keats′s thought, three of his Odes will be analized, both from the point of view of their content and of their structure, thus letting the reader find the aspects already discussed and helping him to have them clarified.

2. Interpretation

2.1. Keats′s thought

2.1.1. Keats and Beauty

Keats′s life was imbued with family tragedies (both his father and his brother Tom died), financial problems, hopless love affair (he was unable to marry Fanny Brawne because of his ill health) and professional setbacks. Moreover, he himself was killed by tubercolosis at the early age of twenty-five (in 1818 he accompanied his friend Charles Brown on a walking trip through Northern England and Scotland, but the physical fatigue, the rain and the strict diet porvoked him a violent cold which resulted in tuberculosis).

His poetry was influenced by the events occurred to him and, in fact, most of his poems are imbued with a sense of melancholy, death and mortality. In these moments of need, Keats turned instinctively to poetry, which he conceived as something absolute, his only reason for life ("I cannot exist without poetry"), and through which he might achieve a kind of divinity. Poetry, he thought, should spring naturally from his inner soul and should reproduce what his Imagination suggested to him; and what struck his Imagination most was Beauty, not the "intellectual beauty" of Shelley, but the one which reveals itself to his senses. Beauty, in fact, became the central theme of all Keats′s poems, since it was the only consolation he found in life. The memory of something beautiful brought him joy, as he wrote in the opening lines of Endymion: "A thing of beauty is a joy forever". Beauty could be either physical (women, nature, statues, paintings) or spiritual (friendship, love, poetry), though they were to be considered together, since physical beauty was simply the expression of spiritual beauty and, even if the former might be subject to time and decay, the latter was eternal and immortal. Imagination recognizes Beauty in existing things, but also it is the creative force of Beauty. In the letter to his friend Benjamin Bailey¹ Keats wrote: "I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart′s affections and the truth of Imagination. What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth - whether it existed before or not". The worship of beauty is the clue to everything in Keats and it is quite usual to find that Beauty and Truth often unite (see closing lines in "Ode on a Grecian Urn").

2.1.2. Keats and nature

Nature was one of the greatest sources of inspiration for Keats. Like Wordsworth he had a cult of nature, though, unlike him, he did not see an immanent God in it. He simply saw another form of Beauty, which he could transform into poetry without the aid of memory; he only enriched it with his Imagination. While Wordsworth thought that "sweet melodies are made sweeter by distance in time", Keats believed that "heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter", i.e.: beauty imagined is superior to beauty perceived, since the senses are more limited than the Imagination and its creative power. While Wordsworth´s love for nature is well explained by the fact that he grew up in the Lake District, thus being influenced by the suggestive landscape, it is harder to understand the connection between Keats and nature, since he was a city boy. For this reason, unlike Wordsworth, whose relationship with nature was spiritual, he looked at nature with the eye of the aesthete, recreating the physical world, including all living things.

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1 Nov. 22, 1817