MOST IMPORTANT QUESTIONS

Q: DISCUSS THE DEVELOPMENT OR DEGENERATION OF KEATS IDEAS FROM IDEALISM

TO REALISM, FROM ESCAPISM TO ACCEPTANCE.
Q: DISCUSS THE KEATS’ AS AN ESCAPIST.
Ans:
All Romantic poets more or less are escapists. Romantic poetry presents not the world of reality, but the world
of dreams. The romantic poet seeks an escape from the hard and stark realities of life into a world of romance
and beauty. Like all romantic poets, Keats longs to escape from the biter realities of life and to “fade far away”,
“dissolve and quite forget, the weariness, the fever and the fret of real life”. But a careful study of his poetry
reveals that his escapism is only a passing mood.
. He had the artist’s vision of beauty and he expresses it in a picturesque style. Keats pursued beauty
everywhere in nature, in art, in the deeds of chivalry and in the great tales of ancient Greece and to Keats
beauty and truth were identical. This was the profoundest and innermost experience of Keats’s soul and he
expressed it most emphatically.
“Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty — that is all, Ye know on earth and all
ye need to know,”
In “Ode to a Nightingale,” Keats would yearn for a life of joy and happiness like that of the nightingale. The
imagination of the poet is set aglow by the song of the bird, and he forgets his sorrow and joins the nightingale
in spirit. This is the moment when nature with her moon and stars and flowers, enters into his soul and his soul
is merged in nature. Keats and nightingale are one, it is his soul that sings in the bird, and he sings.
“Now more than ever seems it rich to die, to cease upon the midnight
with no pain, while thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad in such an
ecstasy.”
Finally, the illusion is broken; the poet comes back to his daily consciousness and regrets that imagination has
not the power to beguile him forever.
In the “Ode on Melancholy”, Keats points out how sadness inevitably accompanies joy and beauty. Melancholy
arises from the transience of joy and joy is transient by its nature. Keats, therefore, accepts life as a whole. It is
this alternative of joy and pain, light

and shadow, that gives life to its harmony and beauty, this is the truth of life and truth is beauty.
“She dwells with Beauty — Beauty that must die, And joy, whose hand is
ever at his
Lips, Bidding adieu.”
In the “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the poet takes us away from the world of time to the world of eternity. The
imagination of the poet passes from the conceited form of beauty to the eternal spirit of beauty — that is, from
the finite to the infinite.
“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore,
ye soft pipes, play on; Not to the sensual fear, but more endeared Pipe
to the spirit ditties of no tone.”
Nevertheless, the world of fun which is the world of escapism has its drawbacks, as it is a “Cold Pastoral”. It
has desolation and non-fulfilment. It is, therefore, in “Ode to Autumn” Keats finally bids farewell to the world of
flora and pan and accepts the world of reality with its ever glittering spring and noble and solemn autumn. Here
his aspirations for disappearing are over, he no more wishes an easeful death which he has had admired many
times in his life. He accepts and teaches even to accept the real world. He is happy with the songs of autumn,
“thou hast thy music too”. Autumn is everywhere: it is in form of a gleaner, a harvester, a cider press owner
and in sounds of evening. Thus his maturity makes him accept and propagate the often deadly-referred season
in the cloak of beauty, reality and music. He achieves the standard of a universal poet and spreads the
message of universal relevance. His flight ends in acceptance that did commence from rejection of the realities
and bitterness of life.
To sum up, we can confidently remark that Keats is essentially a poet of beauty and no one else, in pursuit of
his life long aspired dream he enters sometime into a world which is not plausible regarding the standards of
such a great poet, but his forgetfulness introduces him to the real meanings of life. He appreciates the beauty
of art but he does not declare art as the ultimate finding of human struggle, with its beautified unrealistic
presentation he also mentions its drawbacks. It is unsatisfied, cruel, though eternal world. Life is preferred by
him in spite of all its transiteriness and flux. He declares loudly, “fancy cannot cheat well as it is fame to be”.
This is what makes him a realist rather than an escapist.
Q: DISCUSS JOHN KEATS’ NEGATIVE CAPABILITY.
Q: KEATS IS CALLED NEXT TO SHAKESPEARE. WHY?
Ans:
Keats was one of the finest flowers of the Romantic Movement. His genius blossomed under the romantic
breeze and matured under the sunshine of classicism. The poetry of Keats is not a vehicle of any prophecy or
any message. He did not take much notice of the social, political and literary turmoil but devoted himself
entirely to the worship of beauty, and wrote poetry as it suited his temperament. He was above all, a poet and
nothing else. His nature was entirely and essentially poetical and whole of his vital energy went into art. The
most living thing in Keats’s poetry has been the recreation of sensuous beauty, first as a source of delight for
its own sake then as a symbol of life of the mind and the emotions. Speculative and philosophical interests
always formed the major part of Shelley’s experience and the young Wordsworth but there is almost no trace
of this in Keats. He hates the “poetry that has a palpable design upon us”.
Negative capability is a capacity to negate one’s individual personality and to identify oneself with the
personality of a person whom the writer wants to portray in his work of art. The writer must first himself live the
life of his character and make his mental set up adaptable to various moods and temperaments. Keats had an
impulse to
interest himself in anything he saw or heard. He accepted it and identified himself with it. “If a sparrow were
before my window”, says Keats “I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel”. A poet, he articulates
has no identity; he is continually in for and filling some other body i.e. the poetic character. Keats says,
“He has no self, he is everything and nothing enjoys light and shade, lives in guests, be it foul or fair, high
or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated. It has as much enchantment in conceiving an Iago or Imogen.
What shocks a virtuous philosopher delights the Chameleon”.
Keats found this quality at its fullest in Shakespeare. Though he did not fully achieve his ideal, he was going
towards it. Keats exhibits his distinct mastery on negative capability in his odes. In the Ode to a Nightingale,
Keats faces the tragic dilemma of life with courage, though he does not quite completely resolve the dilemma.
The poem is about the contrast between his own immediately experienced happiness in the bird’s song, his
imaginative participation in an untroubled natural life and a less immediate but more enduring knowledge of
sorrow. Happiness is momentary and transient, the only thing certain is
“The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other green; Where palsy shakes a few,
sad, last grey hairs, Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs.”
For Keats the only way of escaping to share the happiness of the bird is “on the view less wings of poesy”. As
the imaginative participation in bird’s life can be really made eternal with a desire to die at the moment of
greatest happiness. “I have been half in love with easeful death”. The poet’s desire for death is not a longing
for extinction; it is a desire to make a happiness, which he knows to be transient, last for ever. The first word of
the seventh stanza “forlorn”, recalls Keats the poet who creates, foreseeing a poetic immortality, to Keats the
man who suffers, foreseeing only sickness and sorrow and an early death. The song of the nightingale fades
and Keats finishes where unlike Shelley, he generally finishes with his feet on the ground. On the level of
ordinary human experience there is no solution to the conflict. The poet who creates can offer little consolation
to the man who suffers but on the level of poetic creation the conflict disappears. Transitory human happiness
is given permanence is a different sense by being embodied in art.
“Thou was not born for death immortal bird! No hungry generation
tread thee down.”
For Keats, the necessary precondition of poetry is submission to things as they are, without trying to
intellectualize them into something else, submission to people as they are trying to indoctrinate or improve
them.
In Ode on Grecian Urn, the urn is taken as a type of enduring beauty and again the immortality of art is only a
quasi immortality, the contrast between the permanence of the one and the transience of the other is another
poetic pursuit. It is the only way in which human feeling, and natural loveliness can be given lasting
significance. The happy boughs that can not shed their leaves and the lover who can never kiss, but whose
love can never fade, are types of the only earthly paradise that exists
“She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, Forever will thou love
and she be fair!”
In Ode to Autumn, the transience, the pain and ugliness are all unregretfully accepted, for it is all part of a
greater more permanent cycle of birth, growth, death and renewal. Keats allows life to flow upon him. The Ode
stands at the end of Keats’s search
to achieve the maturity of negative capability. The rhythms of seasons are inevitably the rhythms of man’s life
and Keats in enjoying this Autumn accepts the brute fact of winter and affirms faith in the ultimate but
ceaselessly wonderful return of spring.
“Where are the songs of spring? Any where are they? Think not of them, thou
hast thy music too”.
It would be idle to try to turn the odes into great philosophical poems. They come to no conclusion and make
no synthesis. His temperament with its eager love of life, would have been satisfied with a speculative solution
like Yeats’ belief in reincarnation: but he would surely have dismissed it as too fantastic (But their was not the
kind of speculation to which Keats was prone) Yet his odes are not mere decorative and descriptive poems as
parts of them appear to be; nor yet poems of luxurious self-abandonment; nor yet mere manipulation of
feeling. The cavernous conflict, from which they spring, is both emotional and intellectual; yet they proceed
solely by the methods peculiar to poetry. They are in fact supreme example of Negative Capability.
Q: DISCUSS JOHN KEATS AS A PURE POET.
Ans:
Pure poetry can be defined as the verse which allegedly is devoid of instructions and moral content and aims
not to educate but merely to delight one’s aesthetic sensibility by its music or by the pictures it evokes. John
Keats is the first of those in the nineteenth century, who wished to carve out a separate empire for poetry. He
does not see the poet as the trumpet that signs to the battle. He hardly shares, at all, Shelly’s political and
social passions. He is, perhaps, the portent of the doctrine that is later to develop into “art for art’s sake”. The
poetry of Keats is not a vehicle of any prophecy or any message. It is poetry for its own sake. It has no moral,
political or social significance. It is, therefore, the purest poetry.
With a pure poet, the pursuit of beauty overcomes every other consideration. The poetry of Keats is an
unending pursuit of beauty. He pursued truth, indeed, but truth for him was beauty. He never intellectualised
his poetry. He was gifted with extra ordinary sensibility and had an ardent passion for the beauty of the visible
world. His entire being was thrilled by beauty of the world. Nothing gave him greater delight than the
excitement of his senses produced by ‘a thing of beauty’. All his poetry is full of the sensuous appeal of
beautiful things. When we go through Wordsworth and Shelly, we observe a marked difference between them
and Keats in their treatment of beauty and nature. For example, Shelly is known as “The poet of the sky, the
sea and the cloud……” The world that he depicts is rarely the world that we know, but it is world that he has
intensely imagined. His grand description of the effects of the west wind is a great poetry, but the beauty and
grandeur of the west wind go beyond our actual experience. But Keats’s poetry gives us a diverse experience.
It brings us into imaginative contact with beauty that we know. For instance, in “Ode to Autumn” autumn is
represented by Keats by its familiar qualities such as:
“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the
maturing sun….”
Realism and truth inform every detail of the poem. He, the pure poet that he is, sees and presents nature as
she is, and his presentation has that magical quality with which his imagination has supremely endowed him.
Keats was a pure poet in the sense that in his poetry he was a poet and nothing else not a teacher, not a
preacher, not a conscious carrier of any humanitarian or spiritual message. His ambition was to become a poet
pure and simple and his ambition was fulfilled. A critic rightly says;
“Poetry came naturally to him (Keats), as leaves come to a tree it was the spontaneous utterance of his
powerful feelings.”

The poetry of Keats is based on his actual experience of life and, therefore, it is marked by spontaneity and
intensity. He actually listened to the song of a nightingale and the music of the song actually transported him to
the world of imagination.
“Fade for away, dissolve and quite forget….” “But on the viewless
wings of poesy”
“Though the dull brain perplexes and retards Already with thee!
Tender is the night”
The power of Keats’s poetry is due to intense concentration of thought and feeling. Keats being a pure poet
accepts life as it is. Joy and sorrow, happiness and melancholy both exist side by side. If there is discord in life
it has ‘its music too’. He knows that the cold wind and the hot sun are as essential as the fresh assumed rose.
This is also true to the great genius Shakespeare. The poetry of Shakespeare accepts the world of men and
women and accepts them as they are. A pure poet always submits to life, so that life is glorified through him,
so is Keats. A renowned critic Middleton Murray observes about Keats:
“Keats submitted himself steadily, persistently, unflinchingly to life” and had “the capacity to see and to
feel what life is.”
A pure poet feels and expresses his joy in beauty, but when he feels this joy he realizes also a new aspect of
beauty, this is truth. In this identity of beauty and truth lies the secret harmony of the universe. Keats realizes
this harmony and in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” he emphatically cries out.
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty’— that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye
need to know.”
Beauty transcends individuals, time and space. For Keats, Beauty is truth. It is the touchstone of truth. For
Keats, says Mathew Arnold,
“To see things in their beauty is to see things in their truth.”
A pure poet like Keats loves foul and fair, joy and sorrow, mean and elevated alike. Keats turns unflinchingly to
life and human experiences and by an act of imagination transmutes the bitterest human experience into
beauty which is truth.
The joy in the present and the absorption in the beauty of the hour is one of the chief marks of Keats genius as
a pure poet. For him, the necessary quality of poetry is a submission to things as they are, without any effort to
intellectualise them into something else. Keats and the nightingale are merged into one — it is his soul that
sings in the bird:
“But being too happy in time happiness.” (Stanza –I) “That I might drink, and
leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim” (Stanza –II) “Already with thee! Tender
is the night” (Stanza –IV)
He has immersed wholly in the place and in the time and with the things of which he writes. He could be
absorbed wholly in the loveliness of the objects and the joy of the moment. He is fully thrilled by the beauty of
autumn. He does not complain;
“Where are the songs of springs Ay, where are they? Think not of them, thou
hast thy music too.”
(Ode to Autumn)
He has an impulse to interest himself in anything he saw or heard. He accepted it and identified himself with it.
Keats himself explains:
“If a sparrow comes before my window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel.”
He further enumerates that a poet has no identity. He is continually in, for and filing some other body. Keats
has opinion that,
“Of the poetic character, it has no self, it is every thing and nothing. It enjoys light and shades, poet lives
in gusto be it foul or fair…. It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago or Imogen. What shocks the
virtuous philosopher, delights the chameleon poet.”
This is also the spirit of Shakespeare. Though Keats did not fully achieve this ideal but he was advancing
towards it. Summing up our discussion, it can be justly stated that Keats greatest achievement is his
presentation of pure poetry and pure beauty. Beauty itself was his interest, nor beauty to point out moral or to
carry a message. Keats had no lesson to teach. Keats often says that the poet must not live for himself, but
must feel for others and must do well but he must do so by being a poet not by being a teacher or moralist.
There is no didacticism in Keats. He did not want to call his reader attention to social wrongs as Shelley did to
the corrupt state of society as Byron did, to nature as a great moral teacher as Wordsworth did.
Q: KEATS FINDS TRUTH IN BEAUTY AND VICE VERSA, EXPLAIN.
Q: EVEN DEATH IS A SOURCE OF KNOWLEDGE AND IT IS AN ACCEPTED REALITY OF
LIFE, ELABORATE WITH REFERENCE TO KEATS’ IDEAS EXPRESSED IN HIS ODES.
Q: DISCUSS KEATS AS A POET OF BEAUTY.
Ans:
In nothing else is Keats as romantic as in his frank pursuit of beauty to him. Beauty for him is synonymous with
truth. A thing of Beauty is for him a joy forever. Beauty is his religion, a Deity. It is in this pursuit of Beauty that
he completely forgets himself and the world around him. Beauty was for Keats the moving principle of life. He
loved beauty in its forms and shapes in the flower and in cloud, in the song of a bird and in the face of a
workman, in a work of art and in tales of romance and mythology. He utters fervently,
“A thing of beauty is a joy forever, Its loveliness increases,
It will never pass into nothingness.”
Keats did not care for history, or for politics or for religions. The ruling principle of his life was worship of
beauty. He declared, “With a great poet, the sense of beauty over comes every other consideration.”
His (Keats) friend Hayden tells us that;
“The humming of the bee, the sight of a flower, the glitter of the sun, seemed to make his nature tremble,
then his eyes flashed, his cheeks glowed and his mouth quivered.”
He was as sensitive to the beauty of art and literature as to that of life and nature. Keats in his last days wrote:
“If I should die, I have left no immortal work behind me – nothing to make my friends prove of my
memory, but I have loved the principle of beauty in all things and if I had time I would have made myself
remembered.”
In his earlier poem “Sleep and Poetry”, the vast idea (beauty in all things) had involved the poets passing
beyond the realm of Flora and old Pan — that is away from the realm of beautiful things. He had asked:
“And can I ever bid, these joys farewell?”
And he had answered,
“Yes I must pass them for nobler, life

where I may find the agonies, The strife of human

hearts.”
He had thus, in that prophetic poem, seen beyond the principle of beauty that the beauty in all things. But in
“Endymion” he remained wholly within the realm of Flora and old Pan because the agonies and strife of human
heart had not yet touched him directly. He knew that he had to triumph over pain, but pain had not yet come
and he was not one to invoke it intellectually — Death of his brother.
For Keats beauty is truth. He loved not merely beauty but truth as well and not merely the world of imagination
but that of reality. He saw beauty in truth and truth in beauty. He had the artist’s vision of beauty and he
expresses it in picturesque style. To him beauty and truth were identical and he expresses it most emphatically
because in it lays the secret harmony of the universe.
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty That is all ye know on
earth, And all ye need to know.”
He never escaped from the realities of life in pursuit of the beautiful vision of his imagination. In fact, the
visions of his imagination are based on reality. He persistently endeavoured to reconcile the world of
imagination with the world of reality. He accepted life as it is, joy and sorrow, happiness and melancholy both
exist side by side; if there is discord in life, it has its music too. That’s why he loves foul and fair, joy and
sorrow mean and elevated alike. He turns unflinchingly to life and human experiences, and by an act of
imagination transmutes the bitterest human experiences into beauty which is truth.
To understand the true nature and beauty we go to his famous sonnet, “Why Did I Laugh Tonight?” where he
says:
“Why did I laugh tonight? No voice’
……………………………………
……………………………………
……………………………………
Verse, fame and beauty are intense Indeed, But death
intenser……… Death is life’s need.”
Here, Keats is disowning and putting away the Keats who laughed. It is conquering of despair by a deeper
faith. Poetry, Fame and Beauty are glorious, none lights so great a fame in soul as death. Death is the crown
of life.
“Darkling I listen; and for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful death.”
In part the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is a very triumph song to death; as it is a song of despair; as the song of the
bird is an invitation to the supreme ecstasy of death, the voice of immortality is sounding clear amid the agony
of mortality. These two movements of the divided soul are now blending into one strange and unearthly
harmony; it is as though that deep division of his soul had been reconciled with no joy diminished and no pain
denied. All that Keats had felt and thought is there with all its contradictions; but now the contradictions are
made one. This acceptance of his love of good and ill is manifest in all Keats’s poetry as in “Ode to a
Nightingale”, so it is in “Ode to a Melancholy”:
“She dwells with Beauty — Beauty that must die And joy whose hand is ever at
his lips bidding Adieu”
To Keats, death is not a mockery, but a triumph; not a darkness that blots out the soul’s ecstasies, but the
greatest ecstasies of all.

Keats wrote his great odes when his inward victory was accomplished. In “Ode to a Nightingale” we find that
the poet is drowsy with happiness at the Nightingale’s song and he dreams that he might follow the voices of
the bird into a realm of utter forgetfulness of the pair of the world and wants an escape from;
“The weariness, the fever, and the fret’
Here where men sit and hear each other’s groan, Where palsy shakes a
few, sad, last grey hairs, Where youth grows pale and spectre-thin and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow,
And leaden – eyed despairs,
Where beauty can not keep her lustrous eyes,”
Suddenly the dream is real. On the viewless wings of poesy he is fled after the voice to a place of ‘embalmed
darkness’ where he is conscious only of the bird’s song. He is lost in the world which was his life’s
achievement, he finds beauty at its peak, here are colours, flowers, dreamlike forgetfulness, fragrance and
most beautiful not a tinge of bitter real life. He becomes a worshipper of beauty, finds a religious coexistence
with its appearance.
Keats concept of beauty is prone to change as well, he has been in love with the beauty of imaginative world
but in “Ode to Autumn” he understands the real meanings of beauty, when he accepts life with its all apparently
drawbacks. He declares “Thou hast thy music too”. This is what makes him a real follower of real beauty.