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Keats' Concept of Beauty
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.
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.
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:
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:
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:
“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:
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.