Describe Keats as the Romantic poet. | John Keats as a Romantic poet assignment
Literature may be Romantic or Classical. The poet have romantic strains in him; he may equally have some classical strains. Strangely enough Keats has both the elements the romantic and the classical. Romanticism in the literature suggests a tendency where the poet is subjective and he tries to create beauty, which is mysterious and uncommon. Classical is objective; the romantic poet expresses his own feeling and experiences world around him than about himself and he expresses himself mostly in epic and dramatic forms.
John Keats has a fusion of the romantic and the classical but the romantic element dominates in him ' observes Dr Palak. John Keats belongs to the younger generation of the romantic poets. That is, he belongs to the group of Shelley and Byron. By the time the younger poets came to write, the elder poets - Wordsworth and Coleridge had established the romantic trend and given their best to the world.
The younger generation differed from the older one in several respects. The older ones achieved respectability in their own day. They had a place in society. Shelley and Byron remained social outcasts and had to run to the continent where they finally breathed their last. Keats also could not get much recognition in his lifetime; he had to go to Italy for treatment. Wordsworth and Coleridge were enthused by the French Revolution, later on they became renegades.
Shelley and Byron were great supporters of freedom. Keats kept himself aloof from the social and political movements. He was purely a romantic poet; the finest flower of the Romantic Movements. He may be called ' the pure poet ' as he had no consideration about him except, the might the abstract idea of Beauty made him the great romantic poet.
Keats was pure of all the romantic poets, he was a unique phenomenon, he was trained to be a doctor but the Muse ravished him and he could think of nothing but beauty. Other romantic poets made poetry serve their interests. Wordsworth wanted that he should be taken as a teacher first and then a poet: he was essentially a preacher and he presented nature as a great teacher.
Coleridge was also diverted from the true aim of poetry; he had a great zeal for metaphysics. Shelley was a revolutionary idealist. He preached atheism and condemned priesthood and royalty. Byron was self-centred. Keats was a true poet and had an inexhaustible capacity for joy and creating beauty for its own sake. Poetry alone was his passion and beauty was his religion. There was no other consideration with him.
The song of the nightingale is an object of beauty. Keats has added a lot of strangeness to it. He has brought in Queen Moon, the king and the clown and Ruth to it . Then he put in the medieval romance in the following lines of the Ode to a Nightingale considered the very essence of romanticism :
The same that oft-times hath
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
Romantic poets were great lovers of nature. They had their individual approach to nature. Wordsworth spiritualized nature, Shelley intellectualized her, Coleridge liked nature to the supernatural but Keats is content to render nature through the sense. He found no massage or preaching in her.
The poetry of earth is never dead, beautiful sights and sounds are
there even in autumn. In one of his letters Keats wrote, " The setting sun should always set me to right or if a sparrow before my window, I take part in his existence and pick about the grave. "
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