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Critical Appreciation Of John Keats

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British Romantic Literature Assignment (Semester IV)
Nayan Srivastava (1116)
Keats’s Escape from Reality
John Keats, a second generation Romantic poet, is considered the perfect Romantic poet. His works have been read, appreciated and studied across the world, though this was not done during his lifetime. Only in the twentieth century did Keats’ get due credit and respect for the complexity of his odes, his pursuit of truth and beauty and dealing with human difficulty and suffering.
The Romantic poets, as a whole, strived for perfection. Romanticism grew as an opposition to the Enlightenment Age or the Age of Reason and as a result the poets focused on emotion, motives and imagination. Keats is known for his aestheticism, sensuousness and captivating imagery in his works. On analysis of his …show more content…

This ode is the simplest of all his odes and describes the scenes of autumn as a season of abundance. It has a mellow tone and this ode picks up where all the others left off. The simple and sincere appreciation of the season and its reflections in nature as well as the calm acceptance of the upcoming winter project Keats as an evolved individual. Even though a season too is transient in nature, he is inspired in its fleeting beauty and does not yearn permanence as in “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. Keats’ preoccupation with mortality and death as in “Ode to A Nightingale”, too simmers down in this work. The wafting wind is described as living or dying, and the use of these words emphasize an acceptance on his behalf about the natural inevitability of this process. Winter is viewed as a season of absolute decay when everything freezes, and hence “To Autumn” can be seen as a period prior to the ‘death’ when one begins to accept one’s fate and does not fear death anymore. This ode essentially provides a serene and tranquil closure to all the other odes that preceded this and places Keats in a more stable position in

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