Keats’s Aestheticism or Keats as a Poet of Escape

The Influence of Edmund Spenser on Keats

Keats was considerably influenced by Spenser and was, like the latter,
a passionate lover of beauty in all its forms and manifestations. This
passion for beauty Constitutes his aestheticism. Beauty, indeed, was his
pole-star, beauty in Nature, in woman, and in art. “A thing of beauty is a joy
for ever”, he writes and he identifies beauty with truth. “Of all the poets in
his time, Keats is one of the most inevitably associated with the love of
beauty in the ordinary sense of the term. He was the most passionate lover
of the world as the carrier of beautiful images and of the many imaginative
associations of an object or word with whatever might give it 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.

Keats’s Hatred of Didacticism

Keats hated didacticism in poetry. “We hate poetry that has a
palpable design upon us,” he wrote. 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, or rather
obliterates all consideration.” He even disapproved of Shelley for
subordinating the true end of poetry to the object of social reform. He
dedicated his brief life to the expression of beauty. “I have loved the
principle of beauty in all things”, he said.
Accused of Being a Poet of Escape
The world of beauty was for Keats an escape from the dreary and
painful effects of ordinary 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 absolutely
untouched by revolutionary theories for the regeneration of mankind. His
later poems such as the Ode to a Nightingale and Hyperion, no doubt
show an increasing interest in humanity and human problems and, if he
had lived, he would have established a closer contact with reality. As it is,
he may on the whole 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.” Critics accuse him of being indifferent to
humanity but they should realise that he aimed at expressing beauty for its
own sake.
The Contrast Between Him and Two of His Contemporaries
In John 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
detachment. He knows nothing of Byron’s stormy spirit of antagonism to
the existing order of things and he had no sympathy with Shelley’s
humanitarian real and passion for reforming the world. The famous
opening line of Endymion—‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever’—strikes the
key-note of his work. As the modern world seemed to him to be hard, cold,
and prosaic, he habitually sought an imaginative escape from it, not like
Shelley into the future land of promise, but into the past of Greek
mythology, as in Endymion, Lamia, and the fragmentary Hyperion, or of
medieval romance, as in The Eve of St. Agnes, Isabella, and La Belle Dame
Sans Merci. In his treatment of Nature, this same passion for sensuous
beauty is still the dominant feature. He loved Nature just for its own sake
and for the glory and loveliness which he everywhere found in it, and no
modern poet has ever been nearer than he was to the simple ‘poety of
earth’; but there was nothing mystical in the love and Nature was never
fraught for him, as for Wordsworth and Shelley, with spiritual messages
and meanings.
The Most Perfect of Romanticists
“Keats was not only the last but also the most perfect of the
romanticists. While Scott was merely telling stories, and Wordsworth
reforming poetry or upholding the moral law, and Shelley advocating
impossible reforms, and Byron voicing his own egoism and the
political discontent of the times, Keats lived apart from men and from all
political measures, 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, moreover, the novel idea that
poetry exists for its own sake and suffers loss by being devoted to
philosophy or politics, or, indeed, to any cause, great or small.”
The Oneness of Truth and Beauty in His Opinion
Of the qualities that made Keats great and that distinguished him
from his great contemporaries, the first is the disinterested love of beauty.
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 as well as the perfect form. And,
precisely because he held this ideal, he was free from the wish to preach.
His Early Sonnets; and His Later Poetry
It was poetry itself that first enlisted his enthusiasm—poetry and art.
His early sonnets are largely concerned with poets or with pictures,
sculptures, or the rural solitudes in which a poet might nurse his fancy. His
great odes have for their subjects a storied Grecian urn; a nightingale (light-
winged Dryad of the trees, a singer, throughout all ages made glamorous by
poetry); the goddess Psyche, mistress of Cupid, in the flowery tale of
Apuleius; the melancholy and indolence of a poet; and the season of
autumn, to which he turns from the songs of spring—’for thou hast thy
music too’. 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 among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever and the fret Here,
where men sit and hear each other groan.
This was the burden of his earlier poems in which he meditated upon his
business as a poet: 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 the great aim of poetry is to
be a friend
To soothe the cares, and lift the thoughts of man
He also gives here a hint of sterner themes:
Where I may find the agonies, the strife
Of human hearts.
Perhaps Keats would have said that he attempted this nobler life of poetry
in poems likeLamia and Hyperion, but it is very doubtful whether he
believed that he had done justice to this more elevated type of poetic
creation.
His Delight in a Life of Sensations
Love for him was a bed of roses into which one sinks with a delicious
sense of release from pain, responsibility, and moral inhibition. He did try,
in his long fantasy ofEndymion, to rise above the notion of love as the
“mere commingling of passionate breath” and to depict love as “a sort of
oneness”, “a fellowship with essence”. But the delights of the senses,
the free play of the fancy, and the relaxation of the tired nerves were still
the most familiar marks with him.
An Intellectual Side to His Aestheticism
But, according to Cazamian, the aestheticism of* Keats has also an
intellectual side. No one has ever reaped such a rich harvest of thoughts out
of the suggestions which life-had to offer. Through reading, and a thirst for
knowledge, he became acquainted with Greece, paganism, and ancient art.
He became saturated with Hellenism, having nothing of the learned scholar
about him, but rather the naviette, the trifling errors of a self-taught
genius. He read the writers of the Renascence, loved and cultivated
Spenser, Chapman, Fletcher and Milton. His letters show how closely the
cult of Shakespeare was interwoven with his thinking. He admired
Wordsworth most of all among contemporary writers, although the closest
influence was that of Leigh Hunt, to whom he was indebted for something
of his first manner.
An Adoration of Beauty, His Religion
From all these elements, continues Cazamian, Keats built for himself
a personal store of reflections and ideas. 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, and scientific reasoning is an altogether inferior
instrument of knowledge. 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.
The View Expressed by Sidney Colvin
It was not Keats’s aim, says Sidney Colvin, merely to create a paradise
of art and beauty divorced from the cares and interests of the world. He did
aim at the creation and revelation of beauty, but of beauty wherever its
elements existed. His conception of poetry covered the whole range of life
and imagination. It is true that, because he did not live long enough, he was
not able to fully illustrate the vast range of his conception of poetry. During
the ‘ brief period of his creative work, he could only reveal the hidden
delights of Nature, understand and express the true spirit of classical
antiquity, and recreate the spell of the Middle Ages. Fate did not give him
time enough fully to unlock the mysteries of the heart, and to illuminate
and put in proper perspective the great struggles and problems of human
life.