JOHN KEATS

Poetry to Keats is a joy wrought out of the sensation.

OR
Comment critically on Keatss sensuousness and state what value it contributes to his
poetry.
OR
Keats is a mystic through senses-discuss with the help of poems prescribed.
OR
Assess Keats sensuousness on the strength of his poems.
Answer: Poetry, says Maine, as it came to Keats , was not a spiritual vision as with
Wordsworth , not an emancipating vision as it was with Shelley - but a joy , a supreme and
unlimited joy which sprang out of sensation and this joy arising out of sensation was as
exquisite as Coleridges through imagination.

While Wordsworth spiritualizes and Shelley intellectualizes Nature, Keats expresses her through
the senses. The colour, the scent, the touch, the pulling music, these are the things that stir him to
his depths. There is not a mood of earth he does not love, not a season that will not cheer and
inspire him.

It was a temper in Keats, says Stopford A. Brooke, Of unlimited and unmuffled pleasure, a
sensitive girl-like sensuous pleasure in beauty and in the consolation of beauty to the soul. He
flies from one beautiful object of Nature to another, in a butterfly of fashion; tasting and slipping
honey and little caring to settle down upon one.
The cry for a life of sensation rather than of thoughts is characteristic of Keats. The delight in
sensuous beauty in its upward manifestation depends party on the soul and party on the sense.
Physically, Keats was endowed with so fine and pleasure -loving an organization that his senses
as well as his soul were delicately responsive to outward impressions.
Says his friend Haydon:
The glitter of the sun seemed to make his nature tremble.
He luxuriated in sensation, and went into raptures over the taste of claret or of a fruit. In almost
all his fine works, we find him sailing in the same vessel of sensuousness. In these works, says
Hudson, Keats communicates something of his keener susceptibility to the outduller and more
phlegmatic senses.
The Eve of St. Agnes, wonder of romance as it has been often described, is a poem of sensuous
impressions.

Keats, writes Ms Garland is sensuous in the sense that he delights and luxuriates in all things
that please the eye, the ear or the tongue. According to Herford, In his mind, Keats dwelt in
palaces, beautifully wrought with the carvings of gold and jewellery. He travelled through the
realms of gold; he tasted exquisite fruits and spices, smelt roses and lilies; he lived among Greek
Gods and Fairies of the Midsummer Nights Dream.

According to Milton, poetry should be simple, sensuous and impassioned. Says Mathew Arnold:
The eminency in Keats poetry is of the quality of sensuousness. Keats as a poet is abundantly
and enchantingly sensuous. It is easy to discover in his works, the whole gamut of sensations, set
off by a richness and softness of colouring which reveal the complacency of refined fondness.
There is a thesis, that with a great poet, the sense of beauty overcomes every other
consideration. He is pre-eminently a man of sensation. His poetry has rarely been equalled in
description of the beauties perceptible to the senses such as- form, colour, perfume or music and
it is full of passion. It is above all aspiration and desire and the object of his desire is not the
intellectual beauty of Shelley, but that which reveals itself to the enchantment of the sense.
But Keats is by no means the epicurean according to whom the true enjoyment of life is secured
only through a calm and detached reasonableness.

The entire poetry of Keats breathes out an aroma of sensuousness and it is on account of this
aroma of sensuousness, that his poetry is marvellously beautified. Let us examine the sensuous
beauty of his beautiful Ode to a Nightingale:
O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provenal song, and sunburnt mirth!
Though not his masterpiece, Ode to a Nightingale, is undoubtedly the greatest of Keats odes
enshrining a profoundly deep philosophical idea that escape from the grim realities of life is
almost impossible. According to a noted American critic: This Ode is a masterpiece of Keats
in the sense that it helps us in following Keatss logic that perfect happiness, beauty and love are
beyond mans reach because Keats himself yearned passionately and sincerely for these , but
never had.

Keats in this poem, solves an extremely complex and intricate philosophic problem that has
baffled many a bald-headed philosophers: Can Fancy help one to escape from the worries and
pains of the realistic world? or, in other words, - living in the material world full of cares and
anxieties, can we forget its stern realities?
Keats solves this question by saying:
Fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
In the similar fashion, in the Ode on a Grecian Urn, the sight of the Grecian Urn raises a thrill
of love and sensuous delight in the heart of the poet . He wants to revive in the poetry, the festive
occasion of the sacrifice carved on the urn. The poet is led to think that in this way, the
superiority of Art over Nature is established. Art is permanent while human life and sensuous
beauty are transitory.

Hence, to conclude, it will not be an exaggeration to say that there are enough evidences in his
poetry where Keats has revealed his mysticism without parting away from sensuousness. It is,
therefore, appropriate and apt enough to say that -Keats is a mystic through senses. Poetry to
Keats is a joy wrought out of sensation because in one of his letters, he himself has remarked:
With a great poet, the sense of beauty obliterates every other consideration.

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 Consider Keats as a write of odes.
OR
Attempt a critical appreciation of Keatss Odes.

Answer: Keatss personal life was one of despair and suffering and the echoes of that despair and
gloom are found in his odes prominently. Keats, like Shelley, was overpowered by the feeling of
pessimism and melancholy and both these romantic poets invited death to come and take away
the sorrows of their miserable existence. Keatss, vision of human life had a touch of melancholy
and just like his other odes, he expresses the same through the Ode to a Nightingale, stating
therein that human life is a tale of miseries and sufferings.

The odes of Keats are not only the greatest lyrical achievement, but they are also the finest
expression of his genius. Nothing like his odes is to be found in English literature of the earlier
date. He may be said to have created in them, a new class of lyrical poetry. In the odes, he is at
his best and they have achieved a deathless glory. They are eight in number, namely-
Ode to a Nightingale , Ode on a Grecian Urn , Ode to Psyche, Ode on Poets, Ode to Autumn,
Ode to Melancholy, Ode on Indolence, Ode to Fancy and Ode to Maia (a fragment). In these
poems, there is no rhetoric or rhapsody. They are composed in a reflective spirit- now pensive,
now joyous, according to the theme or mood but always self-contained and natural.

The Ode, not the lyric, was to be the field of Keatss triumph over his contemporaries. The Ode
to a Nightingale, the Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to Melancholy and the Ode to Autumn are
among the mightiest achievement of English poetry.

A note of sadness sounds through all. All of Keatss odes possess the beauty of the finest
passages in Endymion or the Eve of St. Agnes. Indeed, their music is of a higher and subtler
quality. In these poems, we find the intense perception of beauty in Nature, in Art, in Literature
and in the world imagination can create.

According to Dr Bridges, Ode to Autumn is the most perfect of all the odes. It has unusual
restraint and yet every line brings some new picture to the eye. The personification of autumn is
exquisitely imagined and such an ode pleases equally the classic and the romantic.
The Ode to a Nightingale has the greatest emotional quality and like some splendid tapestry,
blends many colours. We have almost a Byronic mood in the picture of the weariness and fever
of modern life:
 Here where men sit and her each other groan...
We have a richness of description that vies with Spensers Prothalamion and surpasses it
because of the modern sense of mystery:
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs

And above all, we have that perfect union of the real and the unreal, for as surely as we hear the
song of the bird, we hear other notes that charm the magic casement of fairylands. In the Ode on
a Grecian Urn, the Greek element shows itself more plainly than in any other Ode.
Had Keats left us only his odes, writes Dr Bridges, His rank among the poets would not be
lower than it is.
The live odes contained in the volume of 1820 are Keatss greatest contribution to lyric poetry. It
would be invidious to attempt to distinguish between these-to one reader the embalmed darkness
through which the song of the Nightingale comes to the listener and to another, the
personification of Autumn, which appeals as the perfect expression of Keatss devotion to
beauty. But from the perfection point of view, the Ode on a Grecian Urn is unsurpassed. The
site of the sculptures on a Grecian Urn awakens for his imagination, melodies to the ear. The
song of a Nightingale floating on the dark is the symbol to him of stable beauty in the midst of
perpetually changing human miseries. It is in his odes that Keats has most enduringly enshrined
his idea of Abstract Beauty.
To link the poetry of the future to the best in the poetic achievements of the past, was the
mission of John Keats. With him, poetry was supreme. It existed not as an instrument of social or
of philosophical doctrine, but for the expression of beauty. Real poetry is not of any of school. Its
sweetness and its grace are romantic and classical alike. Freedom of conception and restraint of
style are the twin servitors of beauty for which poetry exists. This is the aesthetic view of literary
art handed down to us not only by Tennyson, but by Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne and more
or less adopted by them from Keats.
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,-that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

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