John Keats as a Romantic Poet with emphasis on Egotistical Sublime and NegativeCapability
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National Institute Of Technology Tiruchirappalli
1) John Keats' views and Comparison with Wordsworth
2) Egotistical Sublime and Negative Capability
3) Illustration of John Keats' views with respect to his poem Ode on a Grecian Urn
Keats was involved in giving unmatched expression to his feelings
lyrically. In his letter titled “On the Imagination and a Life of
Sensations rather than Thoughts”, he writes, “The imagination may be
compared to Adam’s dream - he awoke and found it truth”. Keats
believes that imagination which fuels creative expression is the most
direct access to truth. A “life of sensations rather than of thoughts” is
one that Keats sees to be the most conducive to the life of an artist,
who seeks to understand the world through his poetry. Keats uses his
writings to grapple with the weight of reality and the undesirable
aspects of existence.
In contrast to Wordsworth who reaches elemental truths through his
perception of the world, Keats doesn’t do it. He is not looking for
nature or art objects in search of fixities Wordsworth, his meditation
doesn’t reaffirm where he starts as in the case of Tintern Abbey. In
Tintern Abbey, he projects his intensity to the external topos and it
becomes a mouthpiece to convey his philosophy which is his egotism.
Keats is not cynical and doesn’t reaffirm his ideas but changes his
ideas about the world. For instance, in Ode on a Grecian Urn, the urn
becomes a point of departure. The poem is seen as a cold pastoral.
There is not anything positive, but a dirge, certain coldness regarding
the urn at the end. He doesn’t need to reconcile with the beginning.
When he says that truth is beauty and beauty is truth, he is asking not
to look for philosophical certainties in your observation of the world.
The sensual pleasure you receive is enough and you don’t have to
reaffirm it.
, According to Keats, if a piece of art is to be called truly sublime or
great, it should have a certain intensity in which all the usual binaries
and contraries of life evaporate. He doesn’t wish for the reconciliation
of binaries but accepts the conflict as an intense experience. In that
evaporation, there is the coming together of beauty and truth. For him,
life is a “vale of soul-making”. Keats living in already uncertain
pessimistic times suffered from tuberculosis. According to him,
suffering helps in the making of our souls. The mind or consciousness
leads to our personality but it is the suffering that we experience that
creates our soul which leads to poetic activity. He derives a perverse
pleasure from the suffering and uncertainty of the world as the
suffering helps in his awareness of his self and self-assertion.
In his odes we can see a contention of poetic imagination with the
human experience itself, asking whether its power human beings may
hope to be delivered from their miserable existence, or will only be
brought to face human reality in a sharper clarity. The questioning
process is finally resolved in the embrace of the conflict itself as being
the most intense human experience.
Keats is known for his negative capability. It involves the idea of
self-negation and/or the ability to retain an imaginatively open state of
mind. According to the first, negative capability is “the ability of the
mind to detach itself from its own identity.” Thus the poetic self in
Keats’ poems is devoid of any biographical reference, operating rather
as a “representative figure”, and the poems are viewed as rendering
the mind’s process of discovery. In this respect, Keats chooses
Shakespeare to have a similar poetic temperament as he also erased
concerns about his identity in his works. For Keats this negative
capability was sharply different from the Wordsworthian “egotistical
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