Lit202

Major figure of 2nd generation Romantic poets.

1st gen, wordsworth, coleridge, blake,

2nd gen, shelley, keats and lord byron.

Like lord Byron and like Shelley himself, Keats died at a tragically young age. Unlike them however, he did not die a romantic death. Shelley died at sea. And Byron died while fighting for Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire. Keats died of tuberculosis.

Trained as a doctor - Keats recognised that his life was soon to end when he coughed up blood.

Shelley who died a year later in 1822 - wrote one of the great elegies to commemorate his friends great demise and to ensure that Keats' death and life would forever be romanticised. Keats himself however had already established just how his life and death would be understood - he courted death just as he courted life - as can be seen in his famous letter to fanny brawn.

'Oh that I could have possession of them both - your loveliness and death'.

Life and death brought together in a strange way, a kiss of death, but it's typical of romanticism.

Keats had a profound vision of the role of the senses in experience and philosophical enquiry. In 1817 he wrote 'oh for a life of sensations rather than thoughts'.

Thought - the process of reasoning and thinking - is as often as not in Keats, associated with suffering and anxiety.

This type of preoccupation - the idea of being tormented by thought - the sensitivity of the mind - this is something we can see earlier in Hamlet, in Prince of Denmark.

So it's interesting to note this growing pre-occupation of the Romantics with this opposition between thought and sense.

It's no accident that the Romantics were the first systematic recreational drug users.

Thomas Quincey - seminal example: Confessions of an English Opium Eater

'Do what your heart tells you' implying there is some division between your head and your heart.

There is an opposition between the truths of rational deductive thought and emotion.

There is an interesting idea: to somehow capture and live fully in a moment and to somehow make that moment persist indefinitely, there is an interesting connection between that and some theological ideas developed, called the sacrament of the present moment - the idea of the Christian receiving each moment as a gift from God.

Even in the state of melancholy, in the state of depression, he is intellectually aware that something is going to happen and rid him of that.

There is some minor critique of reason.

Keats' poems delight in the struggle betweens the notions of mortality, the struggle, the pains of life and immortality.

The paradoxical idea of Keats' poems teasing us out of thought - is an appropriate way to describe Ode on Melancholy. An idyllic world of interacting opposites.

The rejection of the limitations of the rationalistic pursuit is typical of the Romantics.

(Dickens' Hard times traces the consequences of isolating or rejecting emotional considerations and the consequences of pursuing relentlessly a cold, rationalistic view of life)

There's a pleasure in sadness. The necessary paradoxical nature of Keats' vision is capture well by the line 'she dwells with Beauty - Beauty that must die;' Beauty must die because it depends on mortality for its being.

If beauty is the ideal than it would seem that immortality must be rejected.

But it would be simplistic to suggest that beauty is the only ideal, rather it is a part along with joy, melancholy, and other things, of a complex aesthetic vision.

Keats' poems tease us to make superficial conclusions to vastly difficult problems.

'Sonnet To Sleep'

In this poem Keats calls on sleep to save him from curious conscience.

Sleep as a kind of soothing ointment to the weakened soul is an idea we encountered in Frankenstein.

'sleep crept over me and I blessed the giver of oblivion' - sleep, in Frankenstein, soothes us from the pain of too keen sensation. Sleep is like death - just less permanent.

More paradoxes: Keats refers to the eyes as 'gloom pleased' (oxymoron)

The poem also explores the complementarity of the world - sleep compliments consciousness. The harmonious state (joy forever bidding adieu) is forever immortalised here in the opening line in the opening line.

There is a reference to poppies. To opium. And the deliberately troubling use of the religious 'amen'.

There is an idea that something is better in the imagination than in reality. So despite all the appeals to the senses and morality, there is an idea that Keats is an idealist - the idea that he understands that things are better in imagination.

if you want things perfect they will be fixed and still and they won't be lived or real.