Douglas Bush noted that "Keats's important poems are related to, or grow directly out of...inner conflicts." For example, pain and pleasure are intertwined in "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn"; love is intertwined with pain, and pleasure is intertwined with death in "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," "The Eve of St. Agnes," and "Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil."
Cleanth Brooks defines the paradox that is the theme of "Ode to a Nightingale" somewhat differently: "the world of imagination offers a release from the painful world of actuality, yet at the same time it renders the world of actuality more painful by contrast."
Other conflicts appear in Keats's poetry:
transient sensation or passion / enduring art
dream or vision / reality
joy / melancholy
the ideal / the real
mortal / immortal
life / death
separation / connection
being immersed in passion / desiring to escape passion
Keats often associated love and pain both in his life and in his poetry. He wrote of a young woman he found attactive, "When she comes into a room she makes an impression the same as the Beauty of a Leopardess.... I should like her to ruin me..." Love and death are intertwined in "Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil," "Bright Star," "The Eve of St. Agnes," and "La Belle Dame sans Merci." The Fatal Woman (the woman whom it is destructive to love, like Salome, Lilith, and Cleopatra) appears in "La Belle Dame sans Merci" and "Lamia."
Identity is an issue in his view of the poet and for the dreamers in his odes (e.g., "Ode to a Nightingale") and narrative poems. Of the poetic character, he says, "... it is not itself--it has no self--it is every thing and nothing--it has no character--it enjoys light and shade--it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, right or poor, mean or elevated..." He calls the poet "chameleon."
Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling summarize Keats's world view succinctly:
Beyond the uncompromising sense that we are completely physical in a physical world, and the allied realization that we are compelled to imagine more than we can know or understand, there is a third quality in Keats more clearly present than in any other poet since Shakespeare. This is the gift of tragic acceptance, which persuades us that Keats was the least solipsistic of poets, the one most able to grasp the individuality and reality of selves totally distinct from his own, and of an outward world that would survive his perception of it.
They believe that Keats came to accept this world, the here and now, as the ultimate value.
Cleanth Brooks defines the paradox that is the theme of "Ode to a Nightingale" somewhat differently: "the world of imagination offers a release from the painful world of actuality, yet at the same time it renders the world of actuality more painful by contrast."
Other conflicts appear in Keats's poetry:
transient sensation or passion / enduring art
dream or vision / reality
joy / melancholy
the ideal / the real
mortal / immortal
life / death
separation / connection
being immersed in passion / desiring to escape passion
Keats often associated love and pain both in his life and in his poetry. He wrote of a young woman he found attactive, "When she comes into a room she makes an impression the same as the Beauty of a Leopardess.... I should like her to ruin me..." Love and death are intertwined in "Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil," "Bright Star," "The Eve of St. Agnes," and "La Belle Dame sans Merci." The Fatal Woman (the woman whom it is destructive to love, like Salome, Lilith, and Cleopatra) appears in "La Belle Dame sans Merci" and "Lamia."
Identity is an issue in his view of the poet and for the dreamers in his odes (e.g., "Ode to a Nightingale") and narrative poems. Of the poetic character, he says, "... it is not itself--it has no self--it is every thing and nothing--it has no character--it enjoys light and shade--it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, right or poor, mean or elevated..." He calls the poet "chameleon."
Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling summarize Keats's world view succinctly:
Beyond the uncompromising sense that we are completely physical in a physical world, and the allied realization that we are compelled to imagine more than we can know or understand, there is a third quality in Keats more clearly present than in any other poet since Shakespeare. This is the gift of tragic acceptance, which persuades us that Keats was the least solipsistic of poets, the one most able to grasp the individuality and reality of selves totally distinct from his own, and of an outward world that would survive his perception of it.
They believe that Keats came to accept this world, the here and now, as the ultimate value.
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