Keats' concept of beauty

Keats was considerably influenced by Spenser and was, like Spenser, a passionate lover of
beauty in all its forms and manifestations. The passion of beauty constitutes his aestheticism.
Beauty was his pole star, beauty in nature, in woman and in art.

“A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”

He writes and identifies beauty with truth. Of all the contemporary poets Keats is one of the
most inevitably associated with the love of beauty. He was the most passionate lover of the
world as the career of beautiful images and of many imaginative associations of an object or
word with a heightened emotional appeal. Poetry, according to Keats, should be the incarnation
of beauty, not a medium for the expression of religious or social philosophy. He hated
didacticism in poetry.

“We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us.”

He believed that poetry should be unobtrusive. The poet, according to him, is a creator and an
artist, not a teacher or a prophet. In a letter to his brother he wrote:

“With a great poet, the sense of beauty overcomes every other consideration.”

He even disapproved Shelley for subordinating the true end of poetry to the object of social
reform. He dedicated his brief life to the expression of beauty as he said:

“I have loved the principle of beauty in all things.”

For Keats the world of beauty was an escape from the dreary and painful life or experience. He
escaped from the political and social problems of the world into the realm of imagination.
Unlike Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron and Shelley, he remained untouched by revolutionary
theories for the regression of mankind. His later poems such as “Ode to a Nightingale” and
“Hyperion” show an increasing interest in human problems and humanity and if he had lived
he would have established a closer contact with reality. He may overall be termed as a poet of
escape. With him poetry existed not as an instrument of social revolt nor of philosophical
doctrine but for the expression of beauty. He aimed at expressing beauty for its own sake.

Keats did not like only those things that are beautiful according to the recognized standards.
He had deep insight to see beauty even in those things that are not thought beautiful by ordinary
people. He looked at autumn and says that even autumn has beauty and charm:

“Where are the song of Spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, –

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue.”

In Keats, we have a remarkable contrast both with Byron on the one side and with Shelley on
the other. Keats was neither rebel nor utopian dreamer. Endowed with a purely artistic nature,
he took up in regard to all the movements and conflicts of his time, a position of almost
complete detacher. He knew nothing of Byron’s stormy spirit of hostility of the existing order
of things and he had no sympathy with Shelley’s humanitarian and passion for reforming the
world. The famous opening line of “Endymion”, ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever’ strikes the
keynote of his work. As the modern world seemed to him to be hard, cold and prosaic, he
habitually sought an imaginative escape from it. He loved nature just for its own sake and for
the glory and loveliness which he found in it, and no modern poet has ever been nearer than he
was to the simple “poetry for earth” but there was nothing mystical in love and nature was
never fraught for him, as for Wordsworth and Shelley, with spiritual message and meanings.

Keats was not only the last but also the most perfect of the Romantics while Scott was merely
telling stories, and Wordsworth reforming poetry or upholding the moral law, and Shelley
advocating the impossible reforms and Byron voicing his own egoism and the political
measure. Worshipping beauty like a devotee, perfectly content to write what was in his own
heart or to reflect some splendour of the natural world as he saw or dreamed it to be, he had
the noble idea that poetry exists for its own sake and suffers loss by being devoted to philosophy
or politics.

Disinterested love of beauty is one of the qualities that made Keats great and that distinguished
him from his great contemporaries. He grasped the essential oneness of beauty and truth. His
creed did not mean beauty of form alone. His ideal was the Greek ideal of beauty inward and
outward, the perfect soul of verse and the perfect form. Precisely because he held this ideal, he
was free from the wish to preach.

Keats’ early sonnets are largely concerned with poets, pictures, sculptures or the rural solitude
in which a poet might nurse his fancy. His great odes have for their subjects a storied Grecian
Urn; a nightingale; the goddess Psyche, mistress of Cupid; the melancholy and indolence of a
poet; and the season of autumn, to which he turns from the songs of spring. What he asked of
poesy, of wine, or of nightingale’s song was to help him:

“Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget,

What thou amongst the leaves hast never known,

The weariness, the fever and the fret,

Here, where men sit and hear each other groan.”

“I Stood Tiptoe Upon a Little Hill” and “Sleep and Poetry” – the theme of both these poems is
that lovely things in nature suggest lovely tales to the poet, and great aim of poet is to be a
friend to soothe the cares, and lift the thoughts of man. Perhaps Keats would have said that he
attempted his nobler life of poetry in poems like “Lamia” and “Hyperion” but it is very doubtful
whether he believed that he had done justice to this elevated type of poetic creation.
Keats’ love of beauty is not ‘Platonic’ in nature. He loves physical objects and takes interest in
human body. He does not become obscene but his love of beauty gives us very attractive and
suggestive picture of women:

“Yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,

Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,

To feel forever its soft fall and swell,

Awake forever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender taken breath,

And so live ever.”

Religion for him took definite shape in the adoration of the beautiful, an adoration which he
developed into a doctrine. Beauty is the supreme truth. It is imagination that discovers beauty.
This idealism, assumes a note of mysticism. One can see a sustained allegory in “Endymion”
and certain passages are most surely possessed of a symbolical value. Sidney Colvin says:

“It was not Keats aim merely to create a paradise of art and beauty discovered from the
cares and interests of the world. He did aim at the creation and revelation of beauty, but
of beauty whatever its element existed. His concept of poetry covered the whole range of
life and imagination.”

As he did not live long enough, he was not able to fully illustrate the vast range of his
conception of beauty. Fate did not give him time enough to fully unlock the ‘mysteries of the
heart’ and to illuminate and put in proper perspective the great struggles and problems of
human life.
 Keats' Sensuousness
Keats is a mystic of the senses and not of thoughts as he sought to apprehend the ultimate truth
of the universe through aesthetic sensations and not through philosophical thoughts.

Sensuousness is a quality in poetry which affects the senses i.e. hearing, seeing, touching,
smelling and tasting. Sensuous poetry does not present ideas and philosophical thoughts. It
gives delight to senses, appeals to our eyes by presenting beautiful and coulourful word pictures
to our ears by its metrical music and musical sounds, to our nose by arousing the sense of smell
and so on.

Keats is the worshiper of beauty and peruses beauty everywhere; and it is his senses that first
reveal to him the beauty of things. He writes poetry only out of what he feels upon his pulses.
Thus, it is his sense impressions that kindled his imagination which makes him realize the great
principle
that:
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’

Keats loves nature for its own sake. He has a straightforward passion fro nature by giving his
whole soul to the unalloyed enjoyment of its sensuous beauty.

Poetry originates from sense impressions and all poets are more or less sensuous. Sense
impressions are the starting point of poetic process. It is what the poet sees and hears that
excites his emotions and imagination. The emotional and imaginative reaction to sense
impressions generate poetry.

The poets give the impressions receive by their eyes only. Wordsworth’s imagination is stirred
by what he sees and hears in nature. Milton is no less sensitive to the beauty of nature, of the
flowers in “Paradise Lost” in a sensuous manner. But Keats’ poetry appeals to our sense of
sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch and sense of hot and cold. He exclaims in one of his
letters:

O for a life of sensation than of thoughts

He is a pure poet in sense of seeking not sensual but sensuous delight.

SENSE OF SIGHT: Keats is a painter of words. In a few words he presents a concrete and
solid
picture of sensuous beauty.
“Her hair was long, her foot was light

And her eyes were wild.”

And in “Ode on Grecian Urn” again the sense of sight is active.

“O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede

Of marble men and maidens overwrought,

With forest branches and the trodden weed;”

SENSE OF HEARING: The music of nightingale produces pangs of pain in poet’s heart.

“The voice I hear this passing night was heard

In ancient days, by emperor and clown:”

In “Ode on Grecian Urn” he says:

“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;”

SENSE OF TOUCH: The opening lines of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” describe extreme
cold:

“The sedge is withered from the lake

And no birds sing.”

SENSE OF TASTE: In “Ode to Nightingale”, Keats describes different kinds of wine and the
idea of their tastes in intoxication.

“O for a beaker full of the warm South

Full of the true the blushful Hippocrene,”

SENSE OF SMELL: In “Ode to Nightingale”, the poet can’t see the flowers in darkness.
There is mingled perfume of many flowers.

“I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,

Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,

But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet.”

Perhaps the best example of Keats sensuousness is “Ode to Autumn”. In this ode the season of
autumn is described in sensuous terms in which all senses are called forth.

“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

Close bosom friend of the maturing sun;”

For Keats Autumn is the season of apples on mossed cottage tree, of fruits which are ripe to
the core and of later flowers for bees. Thus autumn to Keats is full of pictures of delights of
sense. There is the ripe fruit and ripe grains and also there is music that appeals to the ear.

The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft.

Keats is a poet of sensations. His thought is enclosed in sensuousness. In the epithets he uses
are rich in sensuous quality – delicious face, melodious plot, sunburnt mirth, embalmed
darkness and anguish moist. Not only are the sense perceptions of Keats are quick and alert but
he has the rare gift of communicating these perceptions by concrete and sound imagery.

As time passes Keats mind matured and he expresses an intellectual and spiritual passion. He
begins to see not only their beauty but also in their truth which makes Keats the “inheritor of
unfulfill’d renown”.

Keats is more poet of sensuousness than a poet of contemplation. Sometimes he passes from
sensuousness to sentiments. In his mature works like Odes or the Hyperion, the poet mixes
sensuousness with sentiments, voluptuousness with vitality, aestheticism with intellectualism.
However the nucleus of Keats’ poetry is sensuousness. It is his senses which revealed him the
beauty of things, the beauty of universe from the stars of the sky to the flowers of the wood.

Keats’ pictorial senses are not vague or suggestive but made definite with a wealth of artistic
detail. Every stanza, every line is replete with sensuous beauty. No other poet except
Shakespeare could show such a mastery of language and felicity of sensuousness.
 Keats as a Romantic Poet.
Keats is in many ways the most romantic of all romantic poets. Romantic poetry aims at the
complete expression of the individual as compared to classical poetry, which aims at the
expression of social experience. Other romantic poets have some political or social comment
in their poetry. But the poetry of Keats is not a vehicle of any prophecy—any message. It is
poetry for its own sake. It has no moral, no political or social significance. It is, therefore, the
purest poetry.
Poetry of Escape:
All romantic poetry is more or less escapist. Romantic poetry presents not the world of reality,
but the world of dreams. The romantic poet seeks an escape from the hard realities of life in a
world of romance and beauty. Keats is the most romantic of all the poets in the sense that he is
most escapist of them all. He wants “to fade far away, dissolve and quite forget…the weariness,
the fever and the fret” of real life. He sees how men “sit and hear each other groan,” how “youth
grows pale, and specter thin, and dies-. But this does not give rise to a desire to overthrow the
tyrants, as it does in Shelley, nor does he think of a better world.
Love of the Past:
Like all romantic poets; Keats seeks an escape in the past. His imagination is caught by the
ancient Greeks as well as the glory and splendor of the middle Ages. Most of his poetry is
inspired by the past. It is rarely that he devotes himself to the pressing problems of the
present. Endymion, Hyperion and Lamia are all classical in theme, though romantic in style.
The Eve of St Agnes, Isabella and La Belle Dame Sans Merci are medieval in origin. Keats
thus finds an escape into the past from the oppressive realities of the present.
Romantic Themes:

The themes of Keats’ poetry are romantic in their nature. Most of his poetry is devoted to the
quest of Beauty, Love, Chivalry, Adventure, Pathos —these are some of the themes of his
poems. Another strain that runs through his poetry is the fear of death that haunts him
constantly and which finds beautiful expression in his sonnet, When I have fears…. Another
favorite theme of his poems is disappointment in love and its desolation as we find in La Belle
Dame Sans Merci. Again, the rich and sensuous descriptions scattered all over his poetry are
romantic in tone.
Love of Nature

Like all romantics, Keats loves nature and its varied charms.. He has a vivid sense of colour,
and he transfigures everything into beauty that he touches with “the magic hand of chance.”
Cult of Beauty

In nothing else is Keats as romantic as in his frank pursuit of beauty. Beauty is Deity. Beauty
for him is synonymous with Truth. A thing of beauty is for him a joy forever. Beauty is his
religion. It is in this pursuit of beauty that he completely forgets himself and the world around
him.
Supernatural Element

One of the most striking notes of romantic poetry is that of supernaturalism. Just as the romantic
poet looks backward from the present to the distant past, so he looks beyond the scene to the
unseen. His imagination is lured by the remote, shadowy and the mysterious. Among the
romantic poets, Coleridge felt the spell of the supernatural the most, and his Ancient
Mariner and Christabel are two of his important poems which dealt with supernatural. Keats
dealt with the supernatural in his La Belle Dame Sans Merci, and in that little poem he has
condensed a whole world of supernatural mystery.
Addition of Strangeness to Beauty

The romantic quality in literature has been defined by Pater as “the addition of strangeness to
beauty”. All poetry, if it is genuine poetry, reflects, represents and deals with beauty, but
romantic poetry goes a step ahead and imparts strangeness to beauty. When Wordsworth reads
the message of eternity in the simplest flower, he reveals something strange and wonderful;
this revelation of the strange and the mysterious, imparts the essential romantic quality to the
poetry of Wordsworth. Keats sees beauty in the ordinary things of nature. The earth to him is
a place where beauty renews itself everyday; the sky is full of huge cloudy symbols of a high
romance. Keats loved beauty in the flower, in the stream and in the cloud, but he loved it in
each thing as a part of the Universal beauty which is one, an infinite—”the mighty abstract idea
of Beauty”.
The song of the nightingale is sweet and he is enraptured by the song and there comes the touch
of romance. Keats, while hearing the sweet song, passes from the world of time to the world
of eternity.
Thou was not born for death, immortal bird.
The romantic imagination of the poet reveals in a flash a world beyond this world—the world
of eternity where the nightingale sings forever and ever. The song of the nightingale becomes
a symbol of the universal spirit of Beauty. Pursuit of the unknown, the invisible and the infinite
inspires the creation of alt the romantic poetry of the world. It is born out of the craving for the
unknown; it is born out of the desire, not for a limited happiness, but for the boundless joy and
loveliness. The nightingale is, for Keats, the symbol of unlimited joy and infinite happiness.
Keats’ Poetic Style

Last but not least, both in terms of diction and meters, Keats’ poetic style is romantic. Though
it has classical finish, it possesses that romantic touch of suggestiveness by which “more is
meant than meets the ear.” His poetry is full of such unique suggestive expressions:
Then green-robed senators of mighty woods.

How tip-top Night holds back her dark-grey hood.

My sleep had been embroidered with dreams.

Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips

bidding adieu,

The silver snarling trumpet ‘gan to chide.

Thou foster-child of Silence and Slow Time.

Keats has employed various kinds of meters and stanza-forms in his poetic works. He is one of
the great sonneteers in the English language and his Odes, with their musical flow in long
stanzas, stand as unique specimens of romantic poetry.
Keats as a True Romantic

But true romanticism, though it sometimes flings our imagination far into the remote and the
unseen, is essentially based on truth—the truth of emotion and the truth of imagination. Keats
was a true romantic—not a romantic in the hackneyed sense of dealing with the unrealities of
life. He loved not merely beauty but truth as well, and not merely the world of imagination but
that of reality; and he saw beauty in truth and truth in beauty. He never escaped from the
realities of life in pursuit of the beautiful visions of his imagination; in fact, the visions of his
imagination are based on reality. He persistently endeavored to reconcile the world of
imagination with the world of reality. Therefore, Middleton Murry calls Keats “a true
romantic.”
Conclusion
The brief span of Keats’ life fell within, what is known as the age of Romantic Revival in
English Literature, and Keats fully imbibed the spirit of his age. His poetry is a fine example
of highly romantic poetry; in fact, it touched almost all the aspects of romantic poetry—love
for beauty, love for nature, love for the past, supernaturalism, glow for emotions, and last but
not the least in importance, the revealing power of imagination.